


Shallow Sky

by paperiuni



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Action/Adventure, Alien Technology, Canon-Typical Violence, Crew as Family, Drama, F/M, Friendship/Love, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Mission Fic, Partnership, References to Canonical Character Death, Romance, Slow Build
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-09-23
Packaged: 2018-02-09 08:00:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 23,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1975122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperiuni/pseuds/paperiuni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set after Priority: Rannoch. A captured transmission leads the Normandy crew to the far edge of the galaxy in search of what might prove a crucial asset against the Reapers. Tali must try and measure the count of her grief, and Garrus has to contend with phantoms of his own.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Remnant

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which an opportunity presents itself, and Tali manages to seize the moment.

## Part 1: The Open Void

_My hero bares his nerves along my wrist_  
 _That rules from wrist to shoulder,_  
 _Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,_  
 _Leans on my mortal ruler,_  
 _The proud spine spurning turn and twist._

\-- Dylan Thomas

* * *

The recording hisses tinny and distorted from the speaker of Tali's omni-tool.

" _Runtime 22-390-318-45 backing up core processes, packaging database for emergency transmission..._ "

Above her, all is quiet in Engineering save for the background thrum and clatter of the machinery, the perpetual vibration of the mass effect core. The _Normandy_ floats in orbit over Rannoch. Her omni-tool throws a tawny shimmer across the nook of the sub-deck that she claims as her berth. Her bunk is tucked into a corner and bolted down, and she's hung a colourful drape across the way to create a private space.

It's only a span of cloth, but Alliance soldiers bear a certain resemblance to quarians. On a crowded warship, you get good at pretending that certain spaces are walled off. It's the most solitude she can find, and now she needs what she can get.

Her decoder programme display wavers with the dataflow as the audio is transferred into appreciable organic language. Meaning decrypted phoneme by phoneme from ones and zeroes.

" _Damage to platform critical. Any platform within immediate extraction range, please respond._ "

She chose a neutral female artificial voice to relay the record. The syllables are pleasant and precise, and they make her stomach twist.

" _Attempting to transmit coordinates..._ "

The voice breaks into clicks and beeps, too confused for her experimental software to interpret. Biting back a dismayed sound, she pulls up another readout, an array of Fleet combat logs.

" _Attempt... attempt failed,_ " her programme stutters, the tone sober and sedate. " _Repeating._ "

She selects a combat log from the list. _Fleet Date 117-04-3278-Rannoch, 30:10 - Heavy Fleet frigate_ Aranja _began engagement on Orbital Station Adas-7. Station occupied by hostile geth forces. Estimated numbers..._

In the first display, the record timestamp begins roughly a Rannoch hour later. 

" _Repeating. Database backup complete. Attempting transmission._ "

She doesn't really need the engagement data. The _Normandy_ 's sensors picked up the looping record close to an old quarian station during a recon sweep. To refuse the connection would be a pointless exercise. She draws her knees in, hunching into herself.

" _Attempt failed_ ," states her programme. " _No carrier, no carrier..._ "

The ancient mining facilities on the planet Adas had been claimed by the geth. When the Flotilla forces poured through the Tikkun relay, the mining stations were one of the first targets selected. A swift, brutal conquest was assured by Admiral Xen's geth signal scrambler.

The stairs down from Engineering clatter under familiar footfalls. Gasping, Tali mutes the omni-tool. The incoming message signal winks at the upper edge of her screen: how long has it been lit?

"Are you there?" Garrus stops short of her makeshift door curtain, the same way she does before entering the main battery.

"Yeah." She drops her feet to the floor. "Uh, come on in. I was wrapping up." A lie, but better than the raw, jittering truth.

"What you are is holed up so deep down the ship that we almost triggered an alarm code to get you to answer." His subharmonics suggest amusement. "EDI wouldn't have appreciated it if I'd taken over the ship comm to call you to the mess."

"Sorry." She taps fidgety fingers against her visor. "I put my omni-tool on silent. I had..."

"Something in the recon logs you wanted to look at."

"Another thing EDI doesn't appreciate is the organic desire for occasional privacy."

"Took you that long to notice?" Garrus leans back against the wall between the drape and the foot of her bunk. "I _did_ ask her to confirm you were still on board."

"Can you blame me for being preoccupied?" Her tone lightens, though not as much as she wishes it would. "What is it? Should I just read the message?"

"Messages, plural. That's Vega, Liara and me who've tried to get ahold of you now."

"Oh." Tali casts up what she hopes is an apologetic look. "I'll be right up, I... Stop finishing my sentences," she snaps as a tug of breath betrays his starting to speak. "I'm done here. It's nothing."

Not a thing. Only a stray string of data caught in a channel sweep, a few chirps and beeps in the black. A geth spaced without a data hub in range. _No carrier. No carrier._

"You sure? The ventilation grill in the corner looks like it hasn't been stared at in ages."

She grabs a wrench from the floor and mimes throwing it at him. "What do you want, Garrus?"

"Vega and I are off shift, and you know we have to get Liara out of her office once a week--team effort--so James dug out a vid." She should probably divine a comment about Vega's taste in the film arts from the way Garrus flicks his hand. "Sweeping epic, lots of explosions, a torrid romance on the side. Sounded like your kind of thing."

"Okay, okay." She shuts down the omni-tool. "It is my first free night since... since we were on the ground on Rannoch."

His mandibles shift with what might be puzzlement. "Far be it from me to knock whatever you do to celebrate, but I was expecting some more drunken revelry. Well, painstakingly sterilised drunken revelry. That must take some of the fun out of it."

"I'd have to dig into your stash to even _find_ any alcohol I could drink." Sidling past him, Tali starts up the stairs. The last few days have been a mad tumble of wonder and debate and confusion, and she is not done processing them by a long shot. What they accomplished down on Rannoch may yet come to nothing if the greater war goes ill. All the same, she _would_ have reason, every magnificent, impossible reason, to celebrate.

_No carrier. No carrier._

Her feet slow on the stairs. _I am sorry. I must go to them_.

"I said, I could be persuaded," Garrus says from behind her shoulder. "For a good cause." There's a light nudge at the small of her back. In another moment, the casual touch might be more than a comfort. Now, she lets it prod her from her brooding.

She swallows the urge to apologise and soldiers on with, "Like a night off with friends and melodramatic vids?"

"That's a pretty good cause." His chuckle is a deep chaff, barely caught by her helmet's audio receptors. "Ask nicely."

A wayward laugh works its way up from her chest. She'll give him this one, take the offer and try and enjoy the distraction. Her decryption efforts, and the bitter grief searing in her, will still be there later.

* * *

Tali wakes while most of the morning shift is still catching their last coveted hour of rest. It's always like this for the first weeks on board: she's struggling to adjust to the day cycle of the _Normandy_ , measured after an Earth day and only three quarters of the Rannoch one that the Migrant Fleet uses as its standard.

She shuffles up to the mess, where the smell of some delicate herbal brew breaks the monotony of the arid, recycled ship air. The lights are dimmed, enough so that they'd be comfortable to Tali's nocturnal eyes even without the tinted visor. Datapads lie scattered over one of the tables. Liara is tapping away through an index, an untouched mug of tea at her elbow. She is in her sleepwear, a rare sight, and if the sculpted ridges of her crown could get tangled, they should be in disarray to complete the picture.

"Working early?" Despite the tempting smell of the tea, Tali contents herself with a glass of water.

"Always." Liara looks up, her eyes a touch hazy. Otherwise she hides the weariness well. "But I should thank you all for dragging me away last night."

"Any time." Not that Tali had much to do with the diversion. She sits down across from Liara. "Can't blame you for taking advantage of the lull. I guess Shepard's already leaning on the controls to go, now that... things are resolved here."

"You mean the shooting and yelling is done. The negotiations are only about to begin."

"True." Winning the battle was only a first step. "Almost glad I resigned my post before I got swept up in that."

"You gave up your admiralship?"

"The Admiralty Board has to stay with the Fleet. I requested leave to come back to the _Normandy_." Home has become split two ways, so all she can do is balance across the distance. "The rank was mostly a formality, you know."

Concern flutters in Liara's expression. "If that is what you want, I'm not going to question it."

"So, what's going on?" A change of subject seems the safest course. "I'm up to speed on Engineering business, but the rest?"

"That's a dangerous question to put to me." Liara sips at her tea. "As far as the _Normandy_ goes, Shepard is coordinating with Admiral Hackett and your admirals, and that will keep us in this system for a while. All these ships and resources need organising."

"At least they're finally _working_ together." Of course, the old subject might ricochet right back at her. "There's no way for us to go but forward."

"You opened the way for that." Liara rests a hand on Tali's wrist, a solid reassurance. "Remember that."

She wants to both drink in the comfort and repel it with anger and recrimination. They did, but at what price? Surely anything should be worth what Shepard achieved down on Rannoch. Surely the sorrow of any one person is too insignificant to even contemplate before the immensity of the war on the Reapers.

Bright, cool light flickers across the kitchen. The coffee machine gives a beep as someone stirs it out of standby. Tali turns, Liara repeating her movement, the pregnant mood broken.

"Oh." Specialist Traynor glances their way across the counter. "I didn't realise anyone was here. I was coming off the dog watch--sorry, that's a human phrase, the late shift--and coffee helps me sleep."

"Isn't it supposed to work the other way?" Tali snaps to the moment.

"Not if you drink it just before bed. First it calms you, then it wakes you up."

"Would you like to sit, Samantha?" Liara piles up a few of her datapads. 

"I'm pretty tired company, but thanks."

"So are we all." Scooting a chair back from the table, Tali motions to her. "It's the wrong hour to sleep for me."

"Of course, the different day length." Traynor takes the offered chair. "Did someone take that into account when they put you on the shift list? I meant to make sure. I've never served with aliens, well, I've never been on a warship before, and when Officer Vakarian came aboard..."

After two long-term missions with Garrus, Tali can see where this is headed. "No one told you about the turian sleep cycle?"

"No," Traynor says, sheepish. "He was very decent about it. Only teased me for a few days."

"That's _very_ decent for Garrus," Liara observes over the rim of her mug.

"You don't say. _I'm_ still hearing shotgun jokes."

"I should hope Shepard told him to go easy on the newcomers."

"Please don't remind me." Traynor's shoulders slump, though that's most likely due to her slide towards sleep. "I try to roll with the punches. You all, you've been doing this for years."

"It keeps getting crazier, though." Tali hums. "I'm not sure how we could up the stakes much more."

"Rannoch brought us some time, and the alliance is stronger again," says Liara. "Do not forget that."

"Thank goodness for that. I have so much recon data to sift through." Traynor cants her head. "Um, Admiral..."

"Tali. Engineer Zorah if you really have to. That's who I am on the _Normandy_."

"Right." Traynor's eyes glint with a weary smile. "EDI said you'd taken a geth signal for analysis from our sweep of the third planet in the system. Adas, was it?" She doesn't quite sibilate the final sound correctly. "I meant to ask if you were able to decode it."

Aware of the joint weight of the other women's gazes, Tali averts her eyes. Something prickles in them, and she's grateful for the obscuring visor. "I was working on it. Why?"

"There was a data package that was downloaded along with the signal. EDI isolated it until we could check it out, but she flagged it potentially interesting. There seem to be data fragments from a geth memory core in there."

"Oh." The sound scrapes barely audible through her breath filter.

"I thought that was why you'd downloaded the record."

It would be the rational answer. Logically Traynor's next question should be why Tali overlooked the data fragments in favour of a broadcast call that was unlikely to yield any useful intel. She cannot help the way her spine stiffens, a sign of tension and discomfort that carries across the species divide.

"I shouldn't have asked, should I?" Traynor sounds hushed. "Sorry. I know things have changed."

"If I may, Samantha?" Liara cuts in, her voice cooler, neutral. "I'd guess that you took a look at that memory data yourself, since you're bringing this up."

"There's a lot missing from it. It seems the platform that housed the geth runtime--that's the word, right?"

"Yeah," Tali replies.

"The platform was badly damaged, and the power core was almost out. When our scan caught it, it triggered the distress call and the data package to upload. It only worked partially, though." Traynor blows on her coffee, the dense smell of it wafting into the air.

"You think there's more in the platform's memory banks. And that that would be worth a look, as well."

It's annoying when Garrus takes it upon himself to complete her musings, Tali thinks, but the way Liara picks up people's trains of thought from thin air is becoming downright unnerving.

Traynor is smiling slightly. "I was going to bring it to the Commander tomorrow. She estimated we'd be ready to leave in two or three days. That would be enough time to make a side trip."

"While I enjoy a secret as much as the next information broker, could you be persuaded to share this one?"

"I was coming to that! I see no one appreciates a good lead-up here. Though it would be easier to show you. And I was about to sleep."

Tali hears herself speak before the impulse to do so even registers. "Please?"

A look passes between the other women. As protected, as obstructed, as Tali is beneath her visor, she knows she's broadcasting anxiety out of all proportion with a promising data find. Besides, with the current situation with the geth, the question of what to do with a damaged memory core is folded into entirely new configurations.

"It's important then." Traynor puts down her coffee mug. "I'll need a console that can access the recon data banks."

"I have one in my office." Liara nods towards the old XO quarters. Tali reminds herself that Miranda is no longer set up there. As familiar and beloved as the _Normandy_ is, as readily as she's falling into her tried and true routines, the ship has changed again.

So has the the XO office: consoles and displays are installed along every wall, and the fans on the data storage drives create a humming flank of warm air on one side of them. It has every appearance of a hasty field setup that's being fixed and added to whenever need demands or time permits. Still, all of Liara's far-spanning networks run through this makeshift nexus.

As Liara boots up the console, Tali shirks back so as not to hover. She should tell Traynor to go sleep. It is a single, unlucky life ending in darkness. One out of uncounted millions. There's nothing concrete to be done anymore. Whatever Traynor's interest in the platform is, it is strategic, not sentimental.

She breathes in slow so the air creeping through the filter almost makes no sound.

Traynor's fingers fly over the keys, displays folding open as she moves through the tiered registers, folders and banks of unsorted signals, strings and fragments. "Here." She pauses at an audio file. "This is part of the memory data. It's incomplete, and it's not geth in origin. It looks like an encrypted recording captured from a tightbeam feed, but the metadata is corrupted."

"The question becomes, why would a geth have it?" Liara leans closer.

"Out of curiosity would work," Tali says. "They've been studying us for a long time. The runtime was trying to send that data somewhere, but the _Aranja_ had blown out the station comms."

Liara clears her throat, and Tali is pretty sure that only kindness is stalling her.

"I decoded the call." The words are like a thread being dragged from her throat. "It..."

"I think you should hear this recording," says Traynor. "EDI helped me reconstruct it, but you know more about geth communications than anyone else on this ship. I was hoping for some help with the tricky bits."

Tali can hear Traynor perfectly, only parsing her meaning seems to be beyond her. Then the world kicks into motion again, judders forward to cover the lag, and she finds herself saying, "Sure. I'll need an access console."

"You can use this one," Liara says. "No one will bother you in my office. It sounds like we have a window of opportunity here."

"I think we do." With a glance at Tali as if to make sure, Traynor sets the audio file to play.

* * *

When Tali goes to find Shepard in the CIC, the commander is poring over a report with Garrus. It doesn't occur to her to protest when he tags along into the conference room, where Traynor and Liara have cued up the salvaged record. Shepard leans expectantly on the edge of a console.

"Okay, let's hear it."

" _If you're right, this is the find of a decade._ " The human woman in the audio speaks with an accent reminiscent of Traynor's, her voice almost vanishing into the interference.

The other speaker, a human man, sounds both younger and vastly more cynical than her companion. " _Yeah, if you keep your mouth shut and get the ship back here fast._ "

" _What's the hurry? A bunch of Prothean ghosts? You said the whole complex was empty._ "

" _As far as I've gone. It's a lot bigger than that. Those tunnels could go on for kilometres._ "

" _Okay, I got you. You think this is important, we'll play it your way._ "

The recording stutters. " _... had better. We'll all come out of this hilariously wealthy, long as we're smart. And quiet._ "

" _I'm moving as we speak._ " The woman pauses. " _You really think it's still functional?_ "

" _Why not? The relays are in perfect working order._ " Something akin to admiration or approval breaks the man's matter-of-fact timbre. " _The Protheans built to last._ "

" _If it is an AI, and if it's been down on that hellhole planet..._ " A long, dragging rattle.

" _... be stupid. It's a mach--_ "

Traynor pauses the file as the voices dissolve into noise. The group gathered in the conference room considers the information, even Liara, who already heard the audio in the early hours of morning.

Shepard only ponders for a few seconds. "You said there was a complete version."

"I was able to clean up part of the metadata." Having had a few hours of working in solitude to fortify herself, Tali has tamped down her private anguish. There's a possible asset at stake. "It shows a backup was made of this record into a data bank on the station, Adas-7."

"That's a few hours at intra-system cruise speed," Liara says.

"It's not much. We've chased after a lot less." Shepard has come to a conclusion: she never takes long to deliberate. "I'll be stuck in talks with the turians at least until evening. Of all the people I could be stuck in talks with."

"You brought in a bunch of synthetics that were pretty much galactic enemy number one until a couple of years ago." Garrus sounds dry rather than in any way defensive. "Some of the generals are a little hidebound. Just keep yelling steadily."

"Thanks for the advice." Shepard huffs, then speaks into the comm. "Joker? I'm going over to the _Rayya_. Yeah, again. Tell XO Williams she has the deck. Tali will forward you flight coordinates."

At Joker's confirmation, she focuses on the four of them again. "We're on your home ground, Tali. Any idea what kind of shape that station is in?"

"It's quarian-built, but the geth were using it since the war. I don't know exactly what kind of modifications they made."

"Couldn't you ask?" Traynor has stopped browsing her console. The words, innocuous as they are, puncture Tali's mind like needles.

 _Sorry we crippled your station on the way in. Now we need something from those data banks we almost blew into space. Would you mind giving us a hand?_ No matter how she formulates that, it comes out awful, too raw, too presumptuous, after everything. She pretends she does not see the glance Liara exchanges with Garrus, concern slipping between her two friends.

"The... timing might not be very apt," Traynor amends. "We can do a structural scan when we get close."

"Yeah," Tali manages. "It should be empty now. The recon data doesn't show any energy spikes or geth signatures inside the station."

Shepard sets her attention pointedly on Tali. "Pick your team, go in, get what we need and get out."

"I'll go." The way Garrus phrases it, it is not a suggestion.

There's a measured pause before Shepard speaks. "Good. Liara?"

"If you need me, I'll be there. If we're not expecting resistance... I should get some information back to the Crucible team before tomorrow."

"It's all right." Tali brushes Liara's arm. Here they are, each silently worrying over her. She cannot stand mute and let them. "Go dig up some secrets. Garrus and I will handle it."

"I will, however, be _very_ interested to see what you bring back."

"I can think of someone that might not jump for joy." The gravity in Garrus's bearing melts into tart humour. "Pretty sure AIs were punishable by death in his cycle, among all the other things. Like gambling."

"Javik's not going to jump for anything for some time to come," Shepard reminds him. "It's still touch-and-go with his injury, so this is the last thing he needs to hear. Dr. Chakwas is having enough trouble with him as it is."

"Okay." Tali has barely spoken to the fierce, harsh ancient that has taken up residence next to Engineering. She can see the prudence in Shepard's request.

"Get me a report by 1200 hours ship-time tomorrow." Shepard turns to go. "Good hunting."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This started life as a SFF Big Bang fic, but I had to drop out due to time constraints. I am going to polish, finish and post this on a slower schedule.


	2. Dead Air

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the retrieval team boards Adas-7 on a routine mission.

The planet below spirals with lacy masses of greenish clouds, the atmosphere tinged a stained hue of jade. Underneath lie the sprawling volcanic plains of the surface in speckled brown and grey. The crescent-shaped hull of the orbital station spangles with hazy highlights: the approach vector takes them across the sunward side of Adas.

"ETA fifteen minutes." Cortez's hands move across the shuttle controls. "I'm picking out a lot of debris around the station, but we've got a clear approach."

"No... life signs?" Crouched in the co-pilot's seat, Tali wonders what she even means by the term right now.

"None. No geth signatures either. The scan confirms relative structural integrity, too."

"How relative is relative?" Gripping the overhead support bar, Garrus leans into the cockpit.

"Step softly and you'll be fine. It looks like there's an intact docking tube on the other side."

"The station's auxiliary power core is functional," comes EDI's voice through the comm link in Cortez's console. "The servers are located in the middle of the station. I will update your NavPoint when you dock."

"I think the plan was to disable this station," Tali says. "The ones actually built by the geth, well." She leaves the sentence dangling. Adas-7 might have been salvaged for future quarian use. Geth outposts apparently deserved no such consideration.

_Where can we go from here?_

"The comm systems are still down." Garrus gestures at the datapage Cortez has open. "Might be able to restart them from a backup."

"The station electronics were disabled by a localised EMP attack. Then the main communications hardware was destroyed by fire from the _Aranja_. You will have to cross that section. Caution is recommended. However..." EDI pauses. "There is a secondary comm facility in the left wing of the station."

"We won't really need the comms," Tali points out. "We get to the server hub, extract the data locally and come back."

"Sounds thrilling. You take me to all the best places." Garrus slides his helmet on, a practised motion so his fringe slots properly into the tapered dome.

" _You_ volunteered, Vakarian." If the riposte is subdued, at least she gets it out. At least she's _doing_ something real. Most of the _Normandy_ crew might welcome the breather, but the sight of the station gliding closer is what centres her: a chance to work, to act, to make a difference.

"Five minutes," Cortez says.

"Roger that. Running suit check and switching to helmet link." Tali initiates the diagnostic. There will be no life support or gravity to speak of on the station. The electromagnetic cap closes over her air filter and seals the suit.

Garrus's voice crackles through the comm. "All good. You copy?"

"I copy."

"I will monitor this channel as well, in case you require support," says EDI.

As Garrus checks his guns, the meticulously kept and modded Mantis sliding open in his hands, Tali switches to a private channel from the squad frequency.

"EDI?" The word is soft even though she knows her voice won't carry outside the helmet.

"Yes, Tali?"

"Ah, are you very busy?" What an inane question.

"I am working at optimal capacity. Does this answer your question?"

"Never mind." She has to be fast. The silvery side of the station fills the forward window. "That distress call? Could you trace its position?"

"The signal was weakening. If you wish, I will try. The _Normandy_ will remain in orbit until you return."

"I, um..." Her hands work through the weapons check, going over the graceful asari shotgun Shepard offered to her to try. Maybe she should have taken her old Eviscerator.

"The shuttle will dock in one minute, Tali'Zorah."

"Okay," she breathes. "EDI, please keep monitoring the frequency of that distress call. There could be others that survived. The least the Migrant Fleet can do is see that they're reunited with their people."

"Very well." It is as if EDI's tone has changed slightly.

Tali's HUD flashes with a message alert for the common channel. "Thanks, EDI."

"I am happy to assist. Logging you out, Tali."

She returns to the squad channel to catch the end of Garrus's question. "--thing wrong with the gun?"

"Oh, no." Collapsing the Disciple, she fixes it onto the hardpoints of her suit. "I had to check something with EDI."

"The docking tube remote controls aren't working, so you'll have to jump," Cortez says.

"Sure you can't find someone to shoot at us while we do that?" Garrus seats himself next to the outer door.

"Afraid that's not in my job description, Mr. Vakarian. In any case, I prefer getting you out of firefights to dropping you into them." Cortez seals the cockpit, and his next words come on the squad channel. "You know where the safety cable is?"

"Of course." Tali has to chuckle as she drops to sit next to Garrus. " _Keelah_ , Garrus. You're worse than Shepard. Fought impossible odds for so long that a routine retrieval mission just bores you?"

" 'Worse than Shepard' sounds a lot like a compliment."

Cortez depressurises the cabin, and the outer door opens. The docking tube sits retracted, with a lip of metal floor extending from the airlock, the Kodiak hovering as close as Cortez's sure hand can hold it. Looking down, past the glow of the thrusters there is nothing but the void of space.

"Tech experts first," Garrus offers.

She clips the safety cable on, yanking on the harness to make sure it is secure. She almost takes the leap, then lingers to put a hand on his arm. When he bends to look at her--despite the helmet hiding his face, the intent is clear--she tiptoes and knocks her visor gently against his.

He doesn't know, and she can't summon the words. At this moment, it's all the same. She needs him at her back, guarding her flank, and he chose to be there.

 _Thank you._ That is all she would say. _I see what you're doing. Thank you for that._

_Let some things be simple._

Tali kicks off from the edge of the shuttle into a short, stomach-dropping flight. You never truly get used to zero g, to the freedom and fear of it. Her mag boots strike the docking tube floor and hold fast.

* * *

It takes Garrus a moment to follow Tali. Her abrupt gesture seems stuck on a loop in his head: she turns, reaches up, and lingers there brow to brow--helmet to helmet--the glow of her eyes briefly shuttered.

 _What was that?_ He takes the leap in her wake, then lets the safety cable spool back into the shuttle. Tali moves past him to override the airlock controls. The Kodiak veers away from the station, and Garrus stifles his bemusement. _Doesn't matter. You have a job to do._

"Got it." Tali sounds different on the helmet link: closer to her natural voice, as opposed to the modulated timbre of the suit output.

Through the airlock, they enter a loading bay: a wide, gloomy space gone unused. The ancient quarian signs on the walls morph into turian writing as he scans them through his visor. He sweeps the light on his assault rifle around until it limns out the rounded door on the far side.

The NavPoint EDI sends them indicates a distance of several hundred meters across this wing of the station. In the corridor, emergency strips glimmer on the floor, some sections flickering, others gone out entirely. The microgravity makes each step a calculation to ensure that their footings are firm. Tali takes point, Garrus falls in behind her, and they proceed, shadows of one another in the blue-bathed black.

Sometimes the answers you need are not found in words anyone could speak. In the middle of the war, they talk about the war as little as they can, but Tali hasn't come through the fire of this last fight yet. It's harder to have your friend's six when the bullets flying at her are intangible.

"Broken floor ahead," Tali warns.

"Can we get around?"

Her gun light climbs up the wall. "Go along the ceiling. The server hub is one level up. We need to find a stairway soon."

"Or a ladder." Garrus sticks his boots to the wall and circles up over the hole plowed by a disruptor torpedo. Warped support bars curl from the gap, and splash marks of molten and re-cooled metal roughen the wall. The shot has ripped deep into the station.

In silence, they move on ahead.

After some searching, a ladder leads them through a hatch to the upper level. Here the geth-made modifications manifest: the surfaces have been reinforced with featureless metal, the observation windows running along one side of the corridor replaced with a solid wall. The only light, flat and blue, pours from lamps embedded in the wall at intervals.

They cross another rift cloven into the station by a disruptor torpedo. It has twisted a room, the walls buckled out, the floor rising like a wave to a broken crest. The unstable mass effect fields created by the missile have done their grisly work.

Tali's silence seems even more jagged across the link. Garrus concentrates on picking his footing. The gutted remains of a console intimate that this is where the main comms facility was located.

"Through here," she says at last. They balance on the wall of the corridor--he still hates zero g--because the ripples of destruction from the torpedoes have rent the floor. Austere in its lines, the room beyond reveals a row of consoles on one wall. Past them a doorway leads into a maze of data storage units, encased in dull metal. The two other walls are covered in the pod-like docking ports that the geth use to connect their platforms to the servers.

A memory surfaces, of Shepard stepping into a similar port, for Legion to send her into the geth consensus.

"They look intact." He points at the storage units.

"If they aren't, we came here for nothing." Tali is already examining one of the consoles. He positions himself at her back, so he has as clear a view as possible of all the three doors. There's no immediate cover in the room itself. In these confined corridors, he'll do better with the Phaeston, anyway.

"I need to boot this up. Give me a minute."

"You can have two. We didn't even walk hard. Plenty of oxygen left."

Her hum rattles across the squad channel. A datapage leaps up as she begins, numbers scrolling across it.

"We should consider ourselves lucky they even have a console interface here," she says. "Not just the ports--"

Garrus hears her echo his involuntary inhalation. A tremor shivers the floor, reverberating through the much-abused structure of the station.

"Something hit us." He keeps his eyes on the two exits to the corridor. "A piece of space junk?" His HUD flashes with multiple warning pings: _squad vital signs unavailable--environment sensor data unavailable--diagnosing--_

Something strikes his forearm, and he almost rounds on Tali with a raised rifle. She steps back, dropping the hand she used to slap his arm. "What are you--"

He cannot hear her. No small breaths, no answer to his question. She draws a semicircle with her hand: the _Normandy_ hand signal for _Cover me_. Then she raises her arm and taps along the back of it. _I will run a check_.

He gestures to the server room in turn. _Over there. Get in cover_. Whatever the storage unit cases are made of, they have to withstand small arms fire. The geth keep their lives in this hardware. Garrus can see his own biometric data and shield levels on the HUD, but anything that isn't fed directly from the armour has vanished into error messages.

Another impact travels through the floor. He summons his patience, a sniper's calm, waiting for his shot. At his feet, Tali holds up her omni-tool. She's typed a message on the holoscreen: _Open your omni-tool. Set up a short-range helmet link_ , followed by a list of instructions. Because his tech-grade omni-tool is secured with biometric recognition, she'd have to override his owner ID to make the changes. It's faster for him to replicate her solution himself.

Tali stands guard with her pistol drawn while he scrambles through the setup. In a less tense moment, he'd admire her ingenuity. Now, he needs an end to the oppressive silence.

Then she springs forward across the console room in the glide-jerk strides of mag boots in zero g. Startled, Garrus glances up. The floor vibrates with footfalls down both corridors to the server room--the footfalls of something far more massive than either of them. 

At the closest door, Tali pries open the control panel and begins typing frantically. It's a pronged approach, he understands. She's cutting off one path. In the opposite doorway, a broad, tapering silhouette shifts forward, the light fracturing across cybernetics that twine about its too-familiar figure.

Garrus punches up the combat interface on his omni-tool. It's instinct, not conscious thought, driven by the sight of the defiled creature. He slams down an overload command. The marauder staggers as the electrical impulse tears through its shields.

Reapers. How in hell are there _Reapers_ at Adas? The allied forces have two sizeable fleets spread across the system to pick off any stragglers.

Tali wheels around and fires twice; the M-77 Paladin leaves twin rings of smoke hanging before her. The marauder snaps back as the bullets sink into its chest, but its line of fire to her is open and clear. She sidesteps like an eerie dancer, striving for the safety of the server room, ejecting a heat sink that rebounds from the floor.

Garrus shoots a spray from the hip like he never does, the distance short and Tali his first concern. The marauder's returning fire goes astray along the far wall. It tumbles back, fluid pouring from its shattered chest to form a glistening mist in the middle of the room. Another marauder yanks the twitching corpse roughly outs of its way. The two monsters, dead and alive, bound with unsettling grace in the zero g.

He's never heard of marauders having jamming capabilities. He can waste no time on that, because the second monster is angled behind the corner in the corridor, its shots chipping the wall where Tali just passed. She rounds her way inside the server room, and he dips out to aim another overload at the marauder while she holsters the Paladin in favour of her shotgun.

A hot blue flare of light washes down against the cracked ceiling of the console room. Tali jerks with the kick of her shotgun, then pauses to point furiously at the glare above them. The second marauder is spinning free, crippled by her shotgun blast, and the room is rocking again.

Garrus knows that light. Huddled into cover, he's seen it pour across battlefields. Tali, on the other hand, has just joined them from the Migrant Fleet.

Reaching out, he hauls her back between the storage units. The metal of the outer hull crumples, heated to a glow by the harvester's plasma blast. The shapes of Tali's eyes are wide with alarm as they come face to face, then she curls into the cover of his greater bulk. Beams of light penetrate into the console room, and the station seems to sway with the force of the harvester digging into it, casting aside segments of the ceiling.

Can harvesters _travel_ in space? Mostly he's seen them on planets, but there isn't time for speculation. If they're going to dance with Reapers without air or gravity, at least he won't do it deaf and dumb. In the stillness as the harvester has to recharge its cannon, he finishes the setup with a few rushed clicks of his omni-tool keyboard.

The double cannon speak again in a surge of plasma, but Garrus forces himself to calm.

"Tali. Tali. Do you copy?"

She looks up from her crouch, and her harried voice is the sweetest sound he can imagine right now. "I copy."

"So you don't know what's blocking the comms?" His eye is drawn to the ceiling. They're near the top of the station.

"It looks like we can't _receive_. There's an interference bouncing off incoming signals. The jamming signal is close by, though. Maybe on the station itself."

"The Normandy could be out some distance." EDI must have informed Ashley about the situation with the comms.

"Yes, and whatever brought these Reaper troops here is between them and us." She is right. He can't picture a lonesome harvester flapping through the vacuum with a few marauders in tow. Reapers do nothing without a purpose.

"Then it's you and me against the harvester."

"Plus whatever's on the other side of that door I sealed." Tali, too, casts a glance upwards. The walls are shaking in tight bursts. "My guess is a brute." She may not have fought Reaper forces too often yet, but leave it to her to do her homework about them.

"Great. I'm starting to _like_ these odds." Left unbothered, the harvester can probably tear through the station in time. It will neither tire nor give up.

From between the data storage units, they can only see the glow of the repeated blasts in the console room. Between one and the next, the glow intensifies from a shimmer in the ceiling cracks into a full-on burst of incandescent light.

" _Keelah_!"

"It's through the hull." They can maybe bring down the monster between themselves, though without a biotic or heavy weapons it will be a lengthy battle. The rest of the station might be swarming with Reaper infantry. "Any idea what they want so badly with this station? I'm flattered if they came all this way to kill us, but I thought they saved the personal attention for Shepard."

Tali stands up. "I think we're sitting right on top of it. The data banks. There's nothing else worth their while here."

"So..." He pauses to digest the idea. "It must be something damn important."

"And we have to extract it." Familiar resolution steels her voice.

"Of course. The console is also a front-row seat to the harvester spectacle, though." Garrus draws the Mantis. With armour-piercing rounds to contend with the harvester's plated hide, the sniper rifle is the better option.

"True. I have--"

The next instant becomes an inferno of coruscant plasma, surging through the doorway and into the server room, painting streaks of melting metal along the wall.

"Seal the door!" Tali shouts. "I remember the NavPoint, there's another exit on the other side!"

"And another console?"

"Our first option was just liquefied!"

Thankfully the door controls still work, and Garrus only has to struggle with them a moment before the door clamps shut. They hurry through the server room and down a ladder into a space that serves as a secondary hub of docking ports. The upside is that they are closer to the middle of the station, better protected from the harvester.

"We have a problem." Tali surveys the cramped space. The docking ports are laid side by side to fit them in the room as economically as possible. Garrus barely glimpses another door at the far end; at least they won't be trapped here quite so easily.

"Only one?"

"There's no interface console. The geth platforms can get straight into the ports and the runtimes then enter the consensus." Circling a port, she pops open a panel, so seamlessly inserted that it's invisible against the polished ceramic shell.

"This gets better and better." Having something to shoot would be an improvement. The sniper rifle is oddly insubstantial in his hands without its usual weight.

Tali mutters under her breath, tapping at the panel. "I'm about to make it fantastic."

An amused thrum creeps into his voice. "Lay it on me."

"I need you to get into the port."

He actually glances back at her from where he's watching the ladder hatch. "And do exactly _what_?"

"These ports can be calibrated for organic lifeforms." The display reflects from her visor as she skims through data. "I have the settings for the one Shepard used earlier on my omni-tool."

"Ah." It isn't that he doesn't trust her--he does, implicit and unquestioning. It isn't even that the station holds an unknown number of Reaper footsoldiers bearing down on them. He doesn't have words for the sense of apprehension that comes over him, dark and tarry and yet electrifying.

"Garrus." Tali turns to him, even though neither can see the other's face. "I don't... I know what I'm asking. I know it is a lot. Especially right now. But I wouldn't..." Her voice peters out, and another untimely emotion constricts his throat.

This mission isn't really about the geth recording, not to Tali. The intel may well help them, and the presence of the Reapers confirms it isn't the only important piece of data on the servers. To her there is more to it, a private, unresolved agony.

"If they find us, you pull me out at once." He closes the ladder hatch and latches it. "Really don't fancy being shot dead in a geth pod. Would make a sorry end to the biography vid."

"I swear no one will know." He might never know how much of the stubborn humour in her voice is false. "I'll make up something more heroic."

"Knew I could count on you." For now, he's glad to pretend not to notice everything layered under the banter. Of course her plan is mad as a salarian after a mindfish cocktail. Of course they might be surrounded on all sides. Nothing either of them could say to the other would change the fact that as long as they draw breath, they'll finish the mission.

He hopes to all the spirits of Palaven that this will be worth it.

The back of the docking port's interior is covered in cables, clamped into skeins, circling a line of connection sockets. Jacks for different platform types? The port is tall enough for a Prime. Setting the rifle against the wall, Garrus pores over the details of the port, if only to keep down his own nerves. The control panel flashes, and power vibrates through the port as Tali initiates some sort of start-up sequence.

He lets her work without comment. If she wants his opinion, she'll ask for it, but geth tech has always been her singular area of study. Instead he tries to recall what few remarks Shepard made about the consensus. By Tali's claim, he should be able to navigate it; on the other hand, what use do beings of software have for such concepts as dimensions or directions? How do they perceive time? The spinning of the planets, the stars, the galaxy itself?

Some time this is to feel profound. He should have asked Legion.

"It's ready," Tali says. "As ready as I can make it. I've set the port to disengage if there's any interference with the connection. To... prevent sensory overload."

Or worse, her tone implies.

"Just tell me what to do," he cuts in. "This is your mission, we'll play it your way."

The pause before she answers drags on for long enough that he almost tacks on some sort of reassurance. She isn't a turian--or even a soldier complaining under hardship. Still, she does have a job to do, same as him.

"You need to find whatever data would interest the Reapers." Tali sounds level, if tight. "I'm applying visualisation filters so you can make better sense of the consensus."

"And I just have to remember what I find?"

"No. I'm fabricating an adapter that will let me plug a data drive into one of those jacks in the port. I can't _browse_ the consensus without an interface console."

"What you actually want me to do is be your search engine."

"Pretty much." He wonders if the trace of a smile in her voice should count as a victory, or if he should tell her that the retrieval has failed and they need to get off this damned station.

"Hold still."

Before he comes to a decision--if it even is more than a theoretical choice--the port scanner draws its grid over him. The firm pressure of his armour encases him. The left greave chafes against his spur, a discomfort making itself known only now. Tali rattles off her last instructions in his ear. Oxygen flows into his helmet in regular supply, with each breath, long and steady. He closes his eyes.

Opens them to something impossible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> At this juncture, thank you to everyone who sent me such sweet messages/comments about the first chapter. I hope to continue to entertain. Feedback is greatly appreciated.


	3. Mirage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which the mission demands a new way of looking at things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 13 Aug 2014: I've edited this chapter some, for hopefully greater clarity. If you read it before, you may want to do so again. <3

His awareness of his own body falls away, as if his senses had been lifted from its physical confines and deposited in stranger surroundings. The space around him has a sound, chittering, resonant, almost calming after the suffocating silence on the station. A gleaming square holds him suspended over what seems a sea of currents and eddies, whirlpools and riptides. It is made up of endless shapes, polyhedral, sharp in their lines and corners.

Garrus looks at himself and sees a familiar shape, gloved hands, the converging plates of his hardsuit down his front.

" 'Making sense' is a pretty generous term for this." That is his own voice. Tali must have applied her filters, for as outlandish as the view is, there is an up and a down, though neither ground nor sky, only a point where the fluctuating shapes grow too distant for the eye.

His feet click on the surface as if it were thick glass. As he approaches one edge, another panel slides out to form a path. Nothing in the landscape offers itself as a focal point--what are the shifting shapes supposed to be? Pathways, structures, representations? The servers are running, but are there active geth here, milling about, unable to repair the communications hardware whose failure trapped them?

Until the harvester breaks it way into the server room. And, eventually, reaches the docking ports.

 _"The consensus will see you as another runtime. You should be able to influence it directly."_ Recalling Tali's hurried advice, he clears his throat.

"Uh, I need to..." Think of it as a voice interface. Except that he's giving the command inside the dataflow itself. "Search," he manages. No one is looking, save for possibly a bloody great lot of geth.

A third glossy panel coalesces in front of him, this time at eye height, edged with shivering yellow illumination. _Define search term_ , is spelled out on it in tidy turian letters.

"Reap... ah, Old Machines." That has to be too broad. Something that would warrant their interest. "Old Machine technology. Cases of recovered Old Machine technology. The... the brown dwarf Mnemosyne." Maybe that isn't pertinent.

After each distinct pause in his speech, a new display pops open. He tries to think. If the geth had some anti-Reaper superweapon, they would have employed it instead of submitting. Or they would have mentioned it already--withholding information is evidently unlike them. He's hunting after something more obscure.

"Technology finds from previous cycles. Prothean relics." How substantial are these data banks? He didn't get a chance to peer inside any of the storage units, or even gauge their capacity via omni-tool. "Potential threats to the Old Machines." Would the geth flag something like that?

A display lights up with a list of results. Garrus lifts his hand--or its virtual representation--and skims along the panel. The results are numbered, each in a separate window; as he touches one, it peels off from the panel to expand into one of its own.

_Planet: 1285-996c-Agaiou-1, common Citadel denomination "Carcosa". Timestamp: approx. 2,500,000 Galactic standard years. Search terms: "Technology finds from previous cycles." Play record?_

"Fuck," he says softly. The consensus moves at paces he cannot even fathom, and he's stuck with his glacially slow organic brain. "No, that's _not_ a search term," he adds, as another display materialises. "Cross-reference the technology finds with 'Potential threats to the Old Machines'. Afraid there's no time for academic interest."

How much more time _does_ he have?

He continues, "Add a search for the latest backup from runtime, uh, 22-390-318-45." In this dwindling time, he can at least get Tali that.

The newest window unfolds with a thankfully short list: _Results found: 1. Search terms: "Technology finds from previous cycles". "Potential threats to the Old Machines". "Runtime 22-390-318-45". Play memory?_

With a sharp intake of breath, Garrus slaps his open palm against the surface, and only then realises the difference in phrasing. Around him, the consensus collapses from sight.

* * *

_The geth pitches away from the transport and tucks into a landing crouch, where the impact dampeners will engage before contact. The airflow contains dust, grains fine, composition mixed, storm-force winds._

_The platform lands and sand fountains up to obscure its optics. Its shell is sealed against foreign particles. It scans the storm for the easiest course: the drop has left it some ways from the optimal landing area. As it forges on, its environment sensors record the minutiae of the rugged landscape. Quartz, basalt, iron. Fertile dirt mixed into the soil. The atmosphere does not allow for complex organic life._

_The readings do not compute. There is a local anomaly in the biosphere along the habitable zone of the planet._

_In time, the storm fades, though the winds never stop. They blow arid, scorching air from the starward hemisphere to the night side, across the belt where hardy plant life and simple fauna sustain themselves. The light is long and red, forever falling at a steady angle from the star whose position remains fixed._

_The platform tracks the anomaly, its mission clear._

_Organic data transmissions point to a facility where artificial intelligence was being researched. The dating matches the last arrival of the Old Machines to the galaxy before Nazara. The consensus has agreed to investigate--_

The memory jars. The earlier, silvery view of the consensus blinks across Garrus's vision, and then he is back in his body, back in his armour, his HUD indicating elevated pulse and spiking stress.

He lurches forward in the port and manages not to be sick in his helmet. A prick in his neck marks an anti-nausea injection, administered by his suit systems.

"Hey." Tali peers into the port. "Did it work? Are you okay?"

"Fine," he stammers. A second ago he was in the form and consciousness of another being. "Some kinda glitch. It found the thing--actually, I think the recording we're looking for and the thing the Reapers want are one and the same. Get me back in."

"Oh." Her surprise only lasts a second. "You don't sound so good, though."

"We're onto something big here." He has to trust his own judgment, and time is running short. "Do it."

Without another word, she ducks out of sight to restart the upload.

* * *

Once the port is humming steadily again, Tali takes a moment to scan for the jamming signal. Without her omni-tool sensors, her only clues to enemy presence are the feeble vibrations of movement, muted now that the bulk of the station surrounds them.

Her efforts proving fruitless, she returns to observing the port data instead. The whole rig-up is experimental even for her, and any interruption may be an unknown quantity. On the other hand, if Garrus had the right of it in his hurried deduction, the potential payoff is substantial. Prothean technology, no less a Prothean-era AI, could matter a great deal in fighting the Reapers.

Especially if the Reapers are sending in troops to destroy the information about that technology.

In a smaller, more selfish aspect, extracting this data could salve her own sore heart. A geth ended-- _died_ , she makes herself think--carrying this information. If she can put it to use, maybe that will serve as some poor atonement.

_No carrier. No carrier._

_I know, Tali. But thank you._

Gripping the edge of the port, she knocks her visor against the ceramic surface and allows herself to slump, as if the grief alone were enough to stoop her when gravity will not. Garrus is quiet beside her, the sensory link consuming his focus.

 _Why did you come with me, either?_ she demands from his unmoving form. She isn't blind to the furtive looks her friends have been exchanging since the victory on Rannoch. Some of them even share her mourning. Garrus, if anyone, might understand--does understand, if his attempts to distract her are anything to go by.

She might take that comfort and indulge in it, and let buried fancies flare in her chest. With as much as her planet and her people and even the geth have dominated her thoughts, she hasn't had much time to absorb the subtler implications of rejoining the _Normandy_. Working with Liara and Ashley again is an uncomplicated pleasure, their voices in the mess a gentle reminder of old bonds.

As for Garrus, she holds her hopes close, for what warmth they bring, and tries not to read too much into his joining her on this retrieval that's threatening to become a fool's errand. Sometimes the exact shape of it won't matter, because love itself will do.

The port control panel whines a keen, mechanical warning. Tali breaks from her musings to tweak the settings.

* * *

A hitch, a shiver, and--

_\--The bleak, red-tinted landscape envelops him again. A structure looms on the far edge of the platform's sensors, growing closer with each plodding step._

Engrossing as the memory--sensory recording, whatever it is--is, Garrus reaches back towards the consensus itself. "Is there a fast-forward on this thing?"

A message rolls out across a panel: _Specify desired skip point._

"Uh... when the platform gets to that structure."

Briefly he swims through a grey blur, and then _The platform scans the thick, translucent surface of the dome. The alloys do not match anything in its materials database. To its left there is an aperture, a doorway. The sealed door show signs of recent tampering, consistent with the record of organic presence on site. After overriding the door--a task significantly eased by the previous hack--the geth enters the dome. A chirping, rustling plenty of vegetation opens inside the entry lock: a self-contained, imported ecosystem._

_Soon, the geth comes across a small spacecraft, already partly covered in climbing vines. A quick examination yields no signs of recent organic activity. The controls and interior of the ship suggest the human species._

_Half-wedged under the ship, the geth finds the badly decomposed remains of a human. The microfauna of the dome have obliterated most of the soft tissues._

_It climbs into the cockpit and boots up the ship computers. The mission logs flash open, showering the geth with fragments of data: the dome, the traces of ancient intelligent life, the tunnels beneath, the elaborate laboratories, the safeguards the human explorers were yet to crack--_

A violent break in the recording seems to slew Garrus sideways, dropping him first out of the memory and then clear of the consensus. He knocks against the side of the port, mental shock translating into physical, groaning in protest. "The hell?"

"Chatika!" Tali's voice cleaves the rush of his senses returning. "Guard the door!"

 _Shit_. Through his confusion, Garrus grabs for the Mantis on his right. The rifle is there, in his hand as he shakes off the nausea. In a shimmer of purple, Tali's combat drone buzzes away to the right, where the door leading out of the room is located. The door jolts back and forth, a gap visible where the side of it has been peeled away from the lock by sheer main effort. 

"Garrus?" Tali is crouched down, holding a proximity mine. "How did you--?"

"Got thrown out again." He grips the rifle needlessly hard, as if the exertion could ground him. "What's going on?"

"I can't get the hatch open." If there's fear in her voice, it's leashed and contained. She primes the mine as she speaks. "We're boxed in here. Something's coming through."

"The data, Tali." As little as he wanted to go in, now a part of him screams that the job is only half done. "It's not just a recording, it's... a memory. If geth have memories. This perfect replication of..."

_Get a grip, Vakarian._

The door is flung wide by a taloned hand shoved into the crack, and the brute is in the room with them.

* * *

Throwing the proximity mine with a practised underhand motion, Tali spins back into the meagre cover of a docking port. The first floor-rumbling footfall brings the brute into range. The mine detonates in a burst of white, staggering it back by a precious step. Her drone releases a bolt of incandescent electricity to snake over the armour-plated form.

There's no room for Garrus to find a sniping vantage, no Shepard or James to go toe to toe with the monstrosity. She ducks out to put three rounds into the brute, fighting the recoil as she tries to get the shots off as fast as possible.

"Concussive round!" Garrus warns from behind her. He's cottoned on to her hasty plan: if they manage to pin the brute with enough rapid fire, they can bring it down. Head down, she presses between the port and the wall to protect herself from the flash of the stunning slug finding its target. Punching in a new thermal clip, she scrambles back into position.

The brute looms in the middle of the room, some of the rough plating affixed to it ripped apart by their shots. Behind it, the arcs of Chatika's shock attack paint out another foe at the door.

She has to buy Garrus time. He's off to her left, sighting best as he can in the long, narrow space that is almost more a corridor than a room. The brute crashes towards her, the scything claws leading. Her shields engage and deflect the first strike. With a cry, she rolls to the side and tumbles into the corner of another docking port, floating as her mag boots part from the floor.

Garrus seizes the opening. Metal shrapnel and wet, dark matter erupt from the back of the brute's head. It grapples for her in its death throes, but she braces her forearm on the port and the shotgun on her hip, and her shot carries the dying creature back to sink into another of the ports.

Pain sears across her thigh in a hot, razor rake. She grits her teeth, if not quickly enough to stop a whimper from escaping. Her suit processes are kicking in, squeezing medi-gel onto the wound and sealing off the segment of the suit.

"I'm hit!" If Garrus's status isn't relayed to her HUD, the same works in reverse. "Not critical."

"Marauder!" he calls out. From here, halfway up the side of the port, she spots the new enemy. _Walls of the homeworld, how many more are there?_ Chatika fries the marauder's shields, but the creature's answering spray forces the drone into repair mode. Tali hauls herself up on top of the port, out of the way, as Garrus drops the marauder with another headshot.

For a second, they both stay still, the sounds of their harsh breaths blending across the link.

"That's all of them?" He puts it as a question.

"For now. I hope." She turns the light on her omni-tool to her torn leg. Two parallel bullet swipes. They're already covered in a hardened shell of medi-gel. She keys in an additional dose of analgesic--nothing that would impair her thinking.

"Barricading ourselves in here doesn't look like an option anymore." The door bulges out of its frame, the red damage light shining on the lock. "How bad is it?"

"I can walk." Settling onto the floor, Tali tests the hold of her leg. Her suit sensors give no contamination alarms beyond the ripped section. "Um, so. The data was actually pretty important." She couldn't even let him finish the retrieval. She swallows the rancid wave of self-recrimination.

"Yeah." His gaze moves between her and the docking port they used. "I got through part of it. It's some kind of sensory recording, a geth platform on a scouting mission. Didn't get a chance to download."

By what he is saying, there is more, so much more, to the damaged audio the _Normandy_ captured, and the answers lie on this crippled station. If he goes back in... The repeated glitches don't portend well for the integrity of the data. Their chances to defend this position are nonexistent, and they have no venue of communication with their ship.

"I think we should..."

"Figure that with your leg..." Garrus starts at the same time.

Resigning herself, she gives a nod. Their situation grows more precarious by the minute.

"Let's go take a shot at restarting the station comms," he finishes for both of them. "What's the problem with the hatch?"

"Something's stuck on top of it. I couldn't budge it."

"One moment." He extends a blade from his omni-tool--she should get one of those for herself--and wedges the blade in between the hatch and the floor. He works the hatch ajar, then spends a moment manoeuvring whatever is blocking the hatch out of the way.

"Fallen storage unit case," he says. "It's not pretty up here. I _am_ noting a promising lack of rampaging harvester, though."

"The _Normandy_ must have come." She allows herself a wink of hope.

"Best case scenario, they did." He holds out a hand. "How about we make the micro-g work for us? I'll hoist you up. Easier on the leg, too."

She accepts his help and drifts up along the ladder, using her hands to control her ascent. The doorside wall is bent in the middle as if smashed in by some immense blow. The side of the server room nearest to the door has been licked into a ruin of metal and ceramics by the harvester's fire, the floor gouged into a concave plane, the server cases molten and misshapen.

 _How many geth were still in there?_ she realises. Her hand seeks the grip of her pistol. _Are they gone?_ How much of the hardware can have survived? Retreating for now is the sensible option, however it galls her. Pushing off the wall in short bounds, she moves towards the door. Once they exit the server room, she'll need the support of her mag boots again. Garrus climbs up behind her and crosses to the door first.

"Looks clear." He steps into what remains of the console room. "Come on around--"

Between the rents in the wall, she sees a great, spiny silhouette vault across the console room. It draws back a massive arm, and the floor vibrates with the impact of its landing. Garrus swears, the sniper rifle in his hand halfway up into a firing position when the brute collides with him.

Tali casts herself forward, the Paladin pointed, seeking an angle, a clear line of fire. The faraway, dusky flank of the planet spreads across the opening of the destroyed wall.

Garrus scrambles back to put any distance at all between himself and the monster. His omni-tool folds out, flash-forging the blade. Her shot clips the brute's shoulder. It has found a ready opponent, its legs coiling for another forward spurt.

An anguished shout rises from her throat, a warning, a prayer, a plea. " _Garrus_!"

The brute leaps, and the momentum carries both the creature and its target over the broken rim of the station.


	4. Daybreak, Dusk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Garrus considers the sunrise, and Tali races against time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gentle reader - I've taken the liberty of editing Chapter 3 somewhat, so it may be a plan to go back and re-read that. Apologies for the lateness of this new chapter; work and travel interfered as they sometimes do. I hope you enjoy this one.

Garrus is too close to the edge, to the yawning hole where the wall used to be. The brute smashes through his shields and scores the side of his armour, but the ablative coating absorbs most of the blow. The omni-blade is out, if he can only reach the tubing at the thing's throat.

The impact of the brute charging flings him back. As the armour layers are slammed in against his chest, he grunts roughly, the Mantis slipping from his fingers. Tali screams, ragged and desperate.

The station is a silver sickle against the black of the sky, rushing away from him.

He stares at the cloud-wreathed planet that fills his vision, showing its night side, dark and unthinkably vast.

No.

This is not good.

"Oh, fuck," he gasps into the space of his helmet, heaving shallow, staggering breaths one after another. He's drifting free. _Don't waste oxygen. Control. Calm._

 _Calm_ is aligning a headshot on one of those bouncy Cerberus melee specialists. _Calm_ is leading a fire team through the heart of the Collector base and not losing a single squadmate.

This, this fills his head with white, a blank nothing: no tactic, no skill at arms can get him back on the station.

The link sputters, then Tali's voice trembles into his ear. "Garrus. Garrus? Do you copy?" A hitching breath. "Ancestors, _please_." Then she seems to muster herself. "Tali to Garrus. If you copy, reply. Over."

Some survival instinct or deep-drilled bit of military training shoves at his foggy brain. His armour sensors are flooding his HUD with readings: oxygen levels, suit pressure, suit integrity, heart rate...

Garrus squeezes his eyes shut to block out the sight through his helmet visor. _Only her voice. Focus on her voice._

"I copy." There, he nearly sounds level. "Over."

"Give--give me a sitrep." He can hear how she falls back on procedure like neither of them has since their first missions together, three years ago, testing out the impromptu new squad.

He'll take it. If it keeps her steady--might keep him steady--he'll take anything.

"Right. Pressure is good, oxygen for about two, uh, Earth hours, suit intact. Activating beacon." The distress beacon will switch on in response to his vital signs falling below certain thresholds, but now he flips it on manually.

He's drifting free. Should thank the spirits that he isn't spinning. One thing the hardsuit will not withstand is atmospheric entry, and he has no idea about his ejection trajectory.

"Got it," Tali says. "I'm on my way to the comms. No more Reapers--" The link hisses. "Repeat, on my way to the comms. No Reapers in sight."

Yet. She has a suit rupture and a wounded leg. He can hear the hurry in her tone, imagine her swimming through the station, scampering towards the back-up comms.

A little less than two Earth hours, then the CO2 scrubbers will be at capacity. Converting that to Palaven time, as he must to make sure, it's not much.

"Understood." He struggles to concentrate on her. Ahead, below, the hazy curve of the planet intersects the star field, shadow upon shadow.

"Just hang on." She huffs, but the sound breaks halfway, low and helpless. " _Keelah_ , what a thing to say. Sorry. Just wait. I'm almost there."

He's fumbling for a reply when the link crackles a final time and becomes nothing but static, the distance too great or the signal too weak.

The planet spins on, and he can do nothing but follow.

* * *

A level below Tali, below the gallery that opens over a loading bay, a group of three marauders stands guarding something. A fourth, almost obscured by the bodies of the others, is bent over some kind of interface on a device that looks like a smooth black egg, about the size of a marauder's head.

The sight penetrates the roiling panic in her. That must be the jamming device. In another moment she might wonder at the capacity of Reaper infantry to even employ such tactics.

The marauders are blocking her way to the secondary comms facility. She could not defeat the group--or rather, not the group plus any reinforcements that might come calling. At least the station is laid out simply: corridors in a crescent shape, so she needs to cross the gallery and find out where the station main throughfare continues. It will lead her to the comms.

Then, she needs to reach the _Normandy_. There's nothing else for it, even though her limbs want to go watery with anguish and her heart is trying to climb into her mouth.

Reach the _Normandy_. It's the only hope for Garrus.

How many minutes has it been since the helmet link went dead? Eighteen. So, if he spun off at an angle that will carry him into orbit, that orbit could approximate that of the station...

No. She can't work out the math. She can't stop to work out the math. This side of the station has suffered damage just as the other: a disruptor torpedo has barrelled through the loading bay and smashed a gap in the ceiling. The sublevel above looks as if it would be big enough to crawl through, and the wall insulation might keep her off the marauders' scanners. If they have scanners. She isn't counting it out.

Tali scurries up the wall towards the hole. If she doesn't use her mag boots, even the shiver of her movement is muted.

The marauders continue their watch, heedless of her.

She grabs the edge of the hole and pulls herself inside. The exertion spreads in a building ache through her body, a counterpoint to her throbbing leg. The muscle torn, it is a piece of dead weight.

If there were gravity she'd have to bend double: the sublevel is meant for maintenance drones. She hauls herself forward like a swimmer. A light fixture has collapsed ahead, leaving yet another jagged hole in the ceiling.

From this angle, she can see the four marauders almost straight beneath her. The one huddled over the jamming device is--typing? Delivering a message? Do Reapers not control all their troops over distance? The shadows of the loading bay make the interface stand out in a teal hue. The marauder's head is an indistinct oval across the lit interface, its neck sloping into shoulders that look too slender to have once been turian.

_Fine, it's a weird marauder. Still can't kill it. You're wasting time._

Another fifty metres. Seventy. Eighty. One hundred. Occasionally her HUD pings with an infection level alert, and she pauses to pump another dose of antibiotics into her system.

Another ten metres.

* * *

Twenty-one Earth minutes.

Sunrise.

Red pierces the darkness along the curve of the planet. First it's a mottled copper gleam through the atmosphere, feathered by green cloud.

His helmet visor reacts to the increase in light intensity, darkening to a safe shade to shield his eyes. Garrus squints through it as the brilliant pinprick of the sun races out into a line of flame, broad as the world itself. Adas wakes below, the layers of the atmosphere filtering the dawn into a field of auburn and bronze.

In less than half an hour, he'll watch the star set again.

The bruises where the brute slammed into him rub against his dented armour with every deeper inhalation. No pain, only a press of sensation. He'd take more frequent deep breaths just to feel it. Just to have the solidity of contact, tender flesh with hardsuit, when all else is gone.

 _Is this how you went, Shepard?_ She never spoke of it. It wasn't her way.

He tries to stop counting his breaths. That is the damnedest thing. You can't stop your body from living, from burning up whatever resources it has left.

A breath. Twenty-eight minutes. The planet is bathed in the orange of a full morning.

His left spur still itches. Nothing there to nudge his greave against to shift it. Using his own leg might upset his centre of gravity and send him into a spin.

A breath.

* * *

Tali drops down from the crawlspace and inches across the wall towards the floor. Emergency strips provide enough illumination to sketch out a cubical space filled with consoles, their rounded edges and gentle curves revealing them as quarian in design. A legend on the wall, written in the same material that is used in the strips, reads _Communications_. The letters nearly blur in her eyes as she sways her way down past them.

Coming to a rest in the crook of floor and console side, she opens her omni-tool. The infection levels are under control, but the medication is taking its toll on her lucidity. She punches in a stim injection, then activates Chatika. The secondary comms facility is a cul-de-sac, with only the sub-level as a possible escape route.

Once the door is sealed and her perimeter of two drones and a pair of proximity mines is set, she slides over to the main console. The stims stream through her like a swirl of sparks, and her mind leaps in their wake. Boot up the system, hope it will boot up, and then navigate her way through pre-Fleet software... if the console itself will run.

She has dislodged the faceplate of the console and dug elbow deep in ancient cabling when the helmet link hisses. A rasp of sound, an exhalation picked up by the receptor.

"Garrus?" To hell with comm procedure. "Garrus?"

"Still here." His voice drags as if every word tore another shred from it, but it is him, she can hear him again. "Had to shut my eyes. Not missing much. I mean, great romantic cliche of watching a sunrise in space? Gets old _really_ fast."

There's the damaged wire, it has frayed where a corner of the cable clamp has dug into it, but with a bit of fabricated adhesive... She begins the command sequence on her omni-tool. She has to focus, even if she wants nothing like to drink in his every word and hold them, those snaps of sound the only lifeline she has to him.

"I... I suppose." _Dear ancestors, he's still joking_. "I made it. I'm at the comms. I... put Chatika to keep watch." _Just say anything. Whatever. And keep working._

"And the leg?" He does not ask about the comms. How many minutes do they have, before he drifts out of range again?

"I'm all right." She inserts an omni-gel cartridge into the fabricator. "This suit is a wearable pharmacy, as you once so astutely observed, remember?"

"I'd _like_ to think I was never that short on observations."

"Maybe not your finest hour," she agrees. "They can't all be. Are you..." _Don't let the panic in. You have to fix this console._ "Look, I'm trying to keep talking, and I'll trip over myself and ask something horribly inconsiderate sooner or later, so, sorry in advance."

"Can't imagine what that might be. You mean to say you're never not the picture of tact and poise?"

"You must be confusing me with Liara." Tugging a pair of pincers from her tool belt, Tali delves back into the mess of cables. She'll have to be fast: at this temperature, the adhesive will set almost instantaneously. "I mean, Liara the scariest information broker in the galaxy. She did have her awkward archeologist phase."

"Still hasn't stopped gasping 'by the goddess!' at every awe-inspiring sight." He sounds smothered.

"Mm-hm." Her main attention is on her task. She pulls the damaged cable forward with the pincers. _Reach the_ Normandy. If they know the comms are blocked, why aren't they here yet?

Because they cannot be. There's a reason behind the delay. What Tali can do now is send them as much information as she can. To help her crew help her and Garrus.

"Tali," he says. "You can ask. We're in trouble. No point in dancing around that."

She snips the ragged ends of the wire, then aligns them. A hum of acknowledgment is all she can give him.

"I've got oxygen for another hour. I've gone around the planet." Four hours was what they had at the start. An estimated two and a half to finish the mission, and a reserve of 50 percent for unforeseen contingencies.

Such as getting her squadmate spaced for the sake of some intel.

"So," Garrus continues, "you should hear me out while we've got the chance. The thing I saw in the consensus confirms your audio log."

"Yes." As much as something screams at her not to listen, because that would be admitting that he might not make it back, she knows he's right. Never leave crucial information to a single squad member. She drips the adhesive onto the wire: it sets in a second or two, a neat if crude coating. "Keep talking."

She listens to his account while the console slowly stirs, the boot-up sequence crawling across the interface. Tali struggles to focus both on the startup and on Garrus. It may be thanks only to the stims that she succeeds even as well as she does.

The quantum entanglement systems, wired and written more than six generations ago, are sluggish and complex. The encryptions don't last too long under her hacks, but she is torturously aware of every minute ticking down as she works through the layers of security.

She only has to get through to Specialist Traynor. The most sophisticated jamming device can't interfere with quantum entanglement. That is not to say that she can necessarily make a transmission that can't be tracked. Her fingers tap over the antiquated keyboard with feverish purpose, only hindered by the unfamiliar layout.

"A tidally locked planet?" she echoes Garrus's conclusion.

"Yeah. And a red dwarf star, I'm pretty sure. The planet was habitable, though. Had a biosphere of a kind."

"Right. No navigational data?"

"None that I had time to process." The rue in his words is low, blending into his usual caustic wit. "Before we were interrupted. Rude of them, really."

"We can school them in proper manners once we have some backup." Is she talking too fast? Her mind zigzags from one point of salience to another, bright and bouncing, as long as the stims last.

"You got a defensible position?" Oh, Garrus. Some part of her wants to laugh.

"I'll crawl back into the maintenance level."

"Good."

The last scraps of security fold to grant her full access to the systems. She fishes around for the transmission prompt, finds it and begins keying in the ID of the _Normandy_. "I've almost got it." Now she dares to put it into words.

"When you do, don't stick around." _They may not come right away,_ is the part he leaves unspoken. She knows, watching the gradually receding oxygen levels on her HUD. Rationally, her position is not much better than his. They'll both run out of breathable air in due course.

Reason cannot stop the single image from repeating whenever she closes her eyes: the brute leaping, and Garrus staggering back over the lip of the broken wall.

"I know," she says, her throat thick. "Will you stop giving _me_ advice, when..."

A hiss of static, then silence. The distance gapes too great between them again.

Before the mounting dread can grip her through the bubble of stim-induced lucidity, the ancient console trills with an alert: _Receiver ID established. Initiate communication?_

* * *

His helmet seems to ring with the absence of her voice, until the silence within it swells as vast as the airless, boundless quiet outside the husk of his armour.

Bad choice of words. He's still wearing the best in hardsuits that the Hierarchy could supply. So he'll die in impeccable gear.

The thought tears to the forefront of his mind through barriers of temerity and denial, spattering itself into his consciousness like punching out an exit wound. The low oxygen alert is silent, winking in the corner of his HUD. As if he did not know his life can be measured in minutes.

He has the absurd impulse to reach back and draw the Phaeston. At least he'd go gun in hand.

Turians are taught to embrace their death in the line of duty. It will be blood shed and lives reaped for the good of the united whole.

Garrus forces himself to look again. Underneath him, coppery sunlight catches the peaks and crags of a range of volcanoes and sends their shadows licking the planet for kilometres upon kilometres, like an array of reaching fingers. The sun-facing flanks are bathed in golden red, and the trailing shadows fall in hues of deepest green.

Whatever he said to Tali, it is a hell of a view.

If it is the last thing he'll ever see, it could be--

 _No_ , barks a voice. _Some way this is to die. You took a missile to the face and you clawed your way through._

Here he is, spaced in a moment of carelessness, with nothing to do but point a gun at the cosmos in some final, futile gesture of defiance. It's not even _his_ rifle, the much-repaired, much-customised Mantis that was his faithful companion ever since Omega. Only a backup, snatched from a small arms locker when the Reapers hit Palaven.

He can see the nightfall as a curve of gloom across the planet, like a lid closing over an eye. That's his second orbital sunset. The next one will be the last. On the left side of his HUD, the oxygen indicator falls another notch.

Garrus Vakarian. Cause of death: asphyxiation. Survived countless firefights, a gunship cannon, a certified suicide mission, and choked in his spirits-damned helmet.

 _You better leave this out of the memorial, guys._ Maybe he needs to make a note of that when Tali comes into range again. It's a clockwork occurrence, the direction of his orbit counter to that of the station, and they should intersect once more. _"I'll make up something more heroic."_

"Damn," he mutters. "I'm holding you to that, Tali."

Regular as the repeating pattern of dawn and dusk below, the link rattles with her thin voice. "Oh. Hey. Did you just say something?"

He could crack something about her lack of hearing, or spin the moment into levity in some other way, but his brain seems devoid of ideas.

"Yeah. Uh, you first?" Technically he might be better off not speaking. Minimise his oxygen consumption. Drag out the stubborn minutes. He feels as a cold shock the realisation that this did not enter his mind when he was alone, cut off from the fragile connection.

"I talked to Traynor." It's almost unbearable, the strain of naked hope in her voice, a counterweight to her next words. "They were chased off by a Destroyer. They contacted the Patrol Fleet, and..." Her inhalation shivers, or maybe it's only interference in the link. "They'll come for us as soon as they can."

"Damn," he says again, and feels something sink within him. Anticlimactic is what this is. To be so removed from the fight the _Normandy_ might be in right now. Helpless to do anything more.

"Pretty much." He can hear the seepage of tension from her voice, as if she had given all she has to give. He recognises the feeling because it's bleeding into him, too.

Accept. Breathe. Wait. Their world seems to have shrunk to those options.

"Garrus?"

"I'm listening." For as long as he can.

"If they're not in time..."

He should stop her. _Don't. Don't say it. It would only be about the third impossible rescue we pull off during this war. I'm not even counting back to when we fought the Collectors. Or Saren._ That's the part of his mind that still has the lung capacity to shout into the void.

"I know." He lets his eyes shutter, blocking out the helmet light. "Don't even have to say it. Last thing we want to do is make this awkward, right?"

"Ancestors preserve me," Tali huffs, though there is some inextricable, pale dreg of laughter there. "I was going to say, I just thought of something. It might help. If you can lower your suit temperature."

He clamps onto her words. It's like hauling his own thoughts out of a mire. "Maybe? There's the atmosphere regulation system. Shouldn't be hard to fiddle with."

"I mean," she goes on, "you'll use up less oxygen if you can slow down your body functions."

"In the short term." Turians don't take well to hypothermia. But there _is_ no long term here. He raises his arm in front of his face and is relieved to see the omni-tool open without complaint. It only takes ignoring half a dozen well-meaning warning messages about messing with the settings.

There. Now he has done what he can. He really should shut up and let his breathing even out as much as he can. Hard as it is, while he can still hear her.

"Though," she says, "I think it'd be worth some awkward, no?"

Garrus blows out a tattered sigh. "If you wanna go for it, there's no time like this one." A gradual chill is spreading through his body, starting from the extremities.

"Of course, make me go first. Can't ruin your reputation."

"You know this is all going on record," he retorts. "A sniper's got an image to maintain."

"You're impossible."

"And you love me for it."

After an exasperated exhalation, her voice comes very soft. "I do, Garrus. I do."

He tastes the silence in the back of his throat, parched and sharp, somehow different from before. Then he has to fumble for something like an appropriate response, if there are any in a situation like this. "Nobody in the galaxy whose foolhardy shotgun antics I'd rather cover."

She laughs. He tries to imbibe the sound, to impress it in his memory, that particular, inimitable tenor of her worn, weary mirth.

"That'll have to do," he mutters. "Think the temperature's dropping."

"You shouldn't talk too much. Even if we're still in range."

"Hate the quiet, though." He doesn't mean to let it slip, but it does. His eyes drooping shut of their own accord, he feels paradoxically heavy, as if utterly exhausted. He should be fighting the feeling, not yielding to it, and yet it follows from her plan.

The music begins from silence. Apparently all music should, if you believe the humans. It spins out into a swelling tapestry of sound, one instrument after another lofting into frantic, dramatic chords.

"Sorry," Tali says, almost drowned in the strings reaching their first crescendo. "The _Fleet and Flotilla_ soundtrack was the first thing I could find."

"As long as it's not the musical, we're good." Garrus laughs himself, and lets all the sound and fury of 'Fire in the Courtyard' fill his ears, his eyes squeezed shut.

* * *

Skies of the homeworld, she is thirsty. Her throat seems to shrivel and burn until each gulp of precious air is agony. Her leg, floating useless at an angle as she's braced against the wall of the sublevel, is numbed by medi-gel.

Tali does not look at the clock on her HUD. She has not activated her distress beacon. She relayed her location to Traynor, but any peep from her may lead to her discovery, and then she won't live long enough to die of ashpyxiation.

Never stand on Rannoch again. Never see the end of the war. Never even hear the comm link crack with Garrus's voice, puncturing the great quiet.

She never said she was sorry. How odd, considering all the things she has felt necessary to apologise for in her life, that she never expressed her regret for most likely getting him killed.

The thought seems to become slick in the pinch of her mind, too sleek to be held up for perusal. Maybe that's the lack of oxygen talking. She could look. Could see exactly how many minutes she has left.

Her earpiece bursts with noise. At least three voices bark concurrent instructions and warnings on top of one another, in curt, bewildering snippets.

"It's out," Liara says. "EDI, shift the frequency back."

"Already done, Dr. T'Soni. Do you require further assistance?"

"Just the NavPoint, please. James?"

"All clear!" James calls out. "Scan's clear, too. Better hurry up."

"On my way."

Tali struggles to remember how all this chatter translates into coherent teamwork: she should say something, her parched throat be damned, and why did it not come to her that she should drink? Water. Oxygen. One is plentiful, the other dwindling.

The squad channel mellows down to only Liara. "This is Liara to Tali. We're two minutes out from your last reported location. Do you copy?"

It feels as if she's coughing up a lungful of dust with the words, but Tali manages, "I copy."

"Good. Hold on. We're almost there."

She slumps against the wall and lets the tension out of her body by an effort of will. Then the hatch is cast open, a gun light scanning the crawlspace as James pulls himself up into her hiding place. He takes a firm grip of her wrist and draws her down until she is wrapped over his arm and shoulder, her injured leg dangling free.

Coming over, Liara attaches a tube to a port in her helmet, trailing down to the reserve oxygen tank that she clips onto Tali's belts. And Tali drags in another breath. It escapes as a ragged sob, the tears flowing against her will, blinding her in the helmet.

Liara says something to EDI, securing the pickup. James's voice seems to come from nearer, gruff and level. "Hey, easy now. We've got you, Sparks. We've got you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And this brings us to the end of Part 1 (two more--about eight chapters--to go).
> 
> All feedback is much appreciated!


	5. Exit Wound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which some wounds heal and others persist.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fair warning: This chapter contains some quarian headcanons that don't strictly abide by canon. The in-game portrayal of the envirosuits is a little inconsistent, so I took a bit of artistic liberty.
> 
> Many thanks to AntigravityDevice for the beta!

## Part 2: The Cloudy Height

_Under the mile off moon we trembled listening_  
 _To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound_  
 _And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing_  
 _The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind._

\-- Dylan Thomas

* * *

_"Damn it, Vakarian."_ The steely voice is female, but that's all he can tell. It echoes from the unravelling hem of his consciousness, where everything is darkness and pain, the wheeling of the wan stars, the sunset across the planet like a closing eye, as if it were as sick of looking at him as he is of watching it.

 _"Quick as in five minutes ago, Lieutenant!"_ Shepard? _Solana_? No, but someone almost as familiar... Aware of movement around him, he strains towards wakefulness. There's the hiss of a door closing. _"I'm not losing him now--"_

He'd protest that it'd take more than this to kill him. The nature of _this_ blurs when he tries to grasp at it, spreads like blood into water and whorls away. Repeated sawing sounds echo in his ears.

His helmet is all but torn off. He twitches at the jerk on his fringe. A flash of agony goes off in his head and doesn't dim, suspended at its most searing point. The scraping noises are his own breaths, desperate to enter or exit. Someone tilts him forward, ungentle but sure, and--

\--and he wakes with a groan, the nighttime lights of the medbay greeting him, muted on his uncooperative eyes. The dream is gone: his brain withdraws into the present from the shrapnel of memory embedded into it. It was Ashley speaking. Not Shepard, not his sister. Ash hauling him back into the shuttle.

His hands feeling too heavy for his arms, Garrus peels off the oxygen mask. It's fitted for a turian, thanks to Chakwas and her care of the non-human crew, but he's tired of the damn thing.

The medbay always smells the same. The astringent odour of antiseptic washes and the electric tang of the decon screens mingle into the waft of linens and an underlying hint of bodies: sweat, blood, other fluids. Now, he can pick them apart; it took him a while to work out the ways humans smelled in general.

Garrus flexes his mandibles as if they were misaligned. Chakwas has technically given him permission to be out and about. By the time Cortez pinpointed his suit beacon, his body was coming apart in half a dozen interesting ways. Oxygen deprivation, advanced hypothermia, the beginnings of decompression sickness, the works.

The hallucinations seem to be tapering off into run-of-the-mill nightmares. Although he was on the brink of brain damage from the hypoxia, he came through. In Chakwas's words, he'll be good as new.

Be that as it may, there's one thing he's put off for long enough. He can't really plead convalescence--his own or Tali's--any more.

He turns towards the back of the medbay, where the quarantine chambers are located. The door of the first chamber is shut, the sign on it indicating that it's in use.

Clearing his throat, he speaks into the door comm. "Hey. You awake?"

Something clatters. "Oh! Yeah, I am. Come in. Please." The way Tali's words fall makes his throat tighten.

He waits for the decon screen to run over him, then opens the inner door. The quarantine chamber contains little more than a bed and a table and chair, with a mess of medical instrumentation piled at the foot of the bunk, the soft rattle of the purifying air filters in the background. Tali sits on the bed, stripped down to her undersuit, her leg wrapped in an immobilisation weave.

"Hey." Her voice still rasps. In the sterile atmosphere, she's removed the helmet, and he tries not to drag out his first look at her face in quite some time. It isn't the first time: both incarnations of the ship have had quarantine rooms. Beyond that, in rare moments of downtime, Tali has had the luxury of loosening her strict safety routines.

Reflections of the light shimmer over her eyes, set wide in her face. Her colour seems sallow, the narrow, grooved patterns in her skin darkened by her strained system, as far as he understands quarian physiology. The delicate feelers that run down her scalp and the back of her neck in curving rows are retracted, their nubs, covered in silky tufts of down, sitting against the skin. She holds out a hand. "They didn't let me out to see you."

Of course not. And he hasn't exactly been on top of his messages.

The flighty greeting wilts on his tongue, and he's left to clasp her hand. "Hey, yourself." He sits down, awkward with looming over her. "Feeling better?"

Tali's smile wobbles. "Yeah. Or maybe that's the drug cocktail talking. Being out of the suit is nice, but I'm so full of meds that it gets in the way of enjoying my liberty."

Garrus squeezes her hand in a quick press of fingers. "We could always sneak out. Entertain ourselves by wandering the corridors in a haze. You have the meds, I had the acute oxygen deprivation..."

" _Keelah_ , Garrus."

"Too soon?" _After we both nearly died._ He knows, he knows, in every restless dream and in every waking hour. Audacity has always been his last, best defence against a universe that's rarely pulled a punch on him.

"If I didn't have a bum leg, I would _kick _you for that."__

"I got frostbite in my fingers, we'll complement each other." If he gets a kick at least he will earn it.

"Don't." Her mouth pinches into a curved-down line, eerily reminiscent of a human expression of disapproval.

"I know." She saved his life, for all that it's only one more notch in the gun grip. After a short deliberation, he reaches out to touch her shoulder. "I know."

Tali wraps one arm around his neck, the other around his back, and makes as much of an embrace of it as anatomy allows. Her head settles against the edge of his cowl. "If you know, then shut up for a minute."

His arm finds a place around her. Her back remains rigid under his hand as if she wanted the closeness but couldn't quite relax into it. He takes it for what it most likely is: the laborious unwinding of relief after too near a miss. After all, any moment that he lets his own thoughts drift, they seem to spin back into freefall.

With a sigh, Garrus drops his chin on the top of her head. Under cover of soothing Tali, maybe he can loosen some knots of his own. They made it back. He'd do best to put the whole ordeal behind him.

_I do, Garrus. I do._

Well, there's a detail or two that do clamour for clarity.

Then Tali scampers back with a huge, undignified sneeze, her hand flying to cover her mouth. Concern claiming the foreground, Garrus stands up from the chair. "Everything okay?"

"Yes," she says, and her face contracts with the force of another sneeze. "Uh, I should-- _choo!_ \--get the breath mask. Might be something--on your clothes--the decon didn't get."

"Or," he says, swallowing his chagrin, "maybe I should go. For now. Not that the company's anything less than top-notch, but in the interest of your airways." If her system is still compromised by her injury, he probably should have taken more precautions. He can... raise awkward questions at a better time.

"I'll call," he goes on before the incipient _sorry_ can leave her mouth. "Or spam you with stupid vid clips. If we can get any extranet access today, that is."

"Cute animals are preferred." She blows her nose on a tissue. "You can tell any nosy people that they're-- _chih!_ \--they're for me, if searching for them would tax your image."

"If anyone catches me with footage of damn baby pyjaks, I _will_. See you later."

"Naturally. See you." Tali shoots him a glance somewhere between rude and affectionate as she reaches for the breath mask. He lets that look lighten his steps out of the quarantine chamber until the door shuts at his heels. The banter slotted right into place between them, as it always seems to. It can't erase the memory of Tali leaning into him, stiff and still, torn between nearness and distance.

* * *

Garrus moves along the racks in the small arms locker with methodical care. He wishes he could say he's being diligent, but his ponderous pace owes more to the exhaustion throbbing at his temples.

The only kind of dextro soporifics in the med bay that can muffle the nightmares could also tranquillise a krogan. He wakes with a head full of fog, barely avoids walking into tables in the mess, and loses track of conversations in the middle. Right now he's doing the same due to honest lack of sleep, but if he has to decide, this is the preferable option.

Dr. Chakwas made inquiries with the medical officers of the Flotilla. With all the hubbub surrounding the return to Rannoch, one insomniac turian may not weigh much in the minds of the Fleet doctors.

Passing the automatic sniper rifles without a glance, Garrus hefts one of the newer acquisitions from its rack. All smoothly curved lines and dark brushed metal, the geth gun is designed for a three-fingered hand, but that hand needs strength well beyond the average turian. The grip isn't detachable, either, unlike in most weapons from Council manufacturers, and can't be easily switched for a proper turian one.

"Snooping around, Scars?" Damn, how'd he never notice how quietly James could move? Answer: It took two sleepless day-night cycles to erode his usual level of hearing enough.

"Pretty sure that _Gunnery Officer Vakarian_ has clearance to enter the arms locker," Garrus fires back as James steps around the rack and into view.

"Hey, no need to bite, just askin'." If Vega's here with some thinly veiled concern for his welfare, he'll--and then he smothers _throw himself out the airlock_ because no power in the universe can make that an apt line of internal monologue now.

"I was looking for something new to help me blow out some heads." Garrus sets the geth rifle back into the rack.

"Well, I'm technically the arms master. What's your preference? Williams likes the semi-automatics, but I had you pegged as a one shot, one kill kinda guy."

"Got that right." He hopes James won't pick up on the rue shivering in his subharmonics. He _liked_ that M-92 Mantis.

"The guys nicknamed that one the Javelin, since it needed something other than 'that geth gun the commander brought back'. Esteban figures some of our mods will work on it, but can't tell you much else." James shrugs. "Probably shoots Reapers and Cerberus troops just fine."

" 'Just fine', says the damned scrapper." Garrus lets his mandibles flare with amusement. "A sniper rifle isn't a shotgun. You can't just point it in the enemy's general direction and let the scatter handle it."

"Hey, I keep 'em busy so you can make with the head exploding. To each his own."

"Loosen the firing mechanism a little and I could make it work." The Javelin may end up the best of his limited possibilities.

"There's probably a free workbench in the bay." James gestures for him to follow, and he snatches the rifle back up as they leave the locker. "Going planetside soon? I mean, as soon as any of us will." 

"Yeah." Right. Outside his murky brain, the quarian and geth mobilisation is progressing. "How's that going, anyway?"

"Uh, the way I heard it, the geth caused a pretty little diplomatic incident. They offered some tech help with the Crucible, _but_ they weren't supposed to know about the Crucible yet. So we're stuck in orbit until Shepard sorts it out." From under one of the workbenches, James pushes out a box of assorted tools with his boot. "Ask someone that actually knows for details."

"Will do." Liara or Traynor will no doubt divulge the longer version if Garrus cares to ask. If it takes only days instead of months or years to make the rest of the galaxy grasp that the geth are now an allied force, that will be a victory in itself. 

Even though his head feels stuffed, the concrete task of tweaking the rifle anchors his thoughts. He clamps the Javelin down onto the bench and takes out a work light to first examine how it comes apart. As many guns as he's handled in his life, few so far have been geth weapons.

"Guess you weren't hiding a secret field mission, either." James sounds subtly disappointed. One of the first things Garrus learned about his new crewmate was that as badly as he himself takes to inaction, Vega will be going stir crazy while Garrus is still content to fiddle with firing algorithms and other make-work.

"Would I tell you if I was?" he huffs.

"Come on, Scars." James sprawls down to sit on an equipment crate.

In actuality, he's too weary to talk circles around James. It's a surprisingly challenging pastime even with his full wits about him. 

"I'm on light duty only." Garrus spreads his hands in mimicry of the human _nothing to hide_ gesture. "If anyone's heading out, chances are you'll hear about it way before me."

"Eh," James says, "no choice then. Esteban claims the whatchamacallit on the secondary shuttle's stuck again. I'm gonna go hold out some tools."

Garrus makes a sympathetic noise at James's receding footsteps. The Javelin will occupy him and he will avoid the insides of his own head for a while. And there is a point couched in James's complaints about too much time spent shipside. He is free to roam the ship, but right now, the _Normandy_ is a thin shell of metal and ceramics separating him from the black.

* * *

Rannoch, or at least the river delta where the quarian civilians are settling, is a vista of rugged, open spaces, teeming with the rush of water into the sea and wind over the land. The climate is temperate, but shy of scorching so close to the ocean.

Nobody pays Garrus much mind when he hitches a ride down on a quarian shuttle headed for the encampment. The Migrant Fleet--though the name's obsolete now--is amassing its forces and safeguarding its civilians, all the hustle shot through with a delirious joy that shows no signs of abating.

He tries to imagine Palaven liberated and his stoic people overtaken with such relief. It will happen, he tells himself. If the quarians and the geth can exist side by side, the turians can work with the krogan. Trebia will be free, and the colonies will follow. Unless someone cocks it up and they all become genetic fodder for the Reapers.

The sky is riddled with clouds, but to him, the cloud cover is a kind of refuge, a screen between the ground below and the heights above. His steps are light in Rannoch's gentle gravity, though his armour adjusts the stress on his body to compensate for the difference. He doesn't dial back the adjustment: the sense of his own weight, the planet pulling at him, calms him on a level he couldn't articulate.

Wandering out of the encampment, he heads inland along the river. The squad channel is open in his visor, his rifles mounted to his armour. He only added a couple of perfunctory mods to the Javelin, synced it with his visor and let it be. If he can't be sentimental over a lost weapon, what else is there?

He walks for an hour. The arid hills grow into a maze of rock and shrub, tiered sandstone cliffs whose windward sides are tapestries of geological layers. While he's no stranger to the elements, and has had plenty of drops onto planets that are nothing but wilderness, it's odd to be surrounded by the desert. No structures, no sign of sentient influence on the landscape now that he's passed the last of the geth fortifications.

He keeps walking. Drinks from his flask. Chews on a nutrient bar. Snaps a visor picture of a pair of red-black, sleek mammals looking somewhat like elongated, short-legged varren with broad, tufty ears. They're not baby pyjaks, but Tali might appreciate a glimpse of homeworld fauna.

Eventually, he also tries to nap in the lee of a rock, curled down with the Javelin resting beside him. The heat of the wind and the taste of the air, or even the solidity of the bedrock under his feet, don't seem to let him yield to sleep.

Even so, it is worse on the ship.

He jerks into awareness at some tiny sound. Alarm drowns out the black of his subconscious, speckled with spinning stars.

The sun has moved another fraction. Two Earth hours. On the _Normandy_ , all his equipment systems need to run on Earth time to work with the rest of the crew. He should rig up a secondary display with Palaven time, to help with the cross-checking he does in his head.

Someone is talking. "Repeat, this is Liara to Garrus. Please reply. Over."

"Hey." He taps on the voice input in the visor. "Don't tell me, I leave for a few hours and another galactic crisis erupts in the meantime."

"Nothing so dramatic. Now, if _I_ did the same..."

"All of us have our gifts." He did plan to be back by Rannoch nightfall. "What can I do for you?"

Liara sighs. He'd bet she lets him hear the sound on purpose. "We all worry, you know."

"So do I," he returns, though he has to fumble for the repartee. "About so many things. How many more percentiles of performance can I squeeze out of the Thanix cannon? Will I be doomed to date adventurous krogan women if my scars never heal? What did Vega mix into those dextro drinks he brought me a few weeks back..."

"Garrus."

The problem with old friends is that they start seeing through your evasions. "Liara." Quite on purpose, he gentles his tone. "I'll live. I'll fight when you need me." _As long as I don't fall asleep in the sniper's nest, that is._

"That's not..." Her voice drops away. "I know you will."

Relief stirs even as guilt needles him: she means well. Capable of flaying people alive with her mind or not, Liara has always been a soft touch.

"So keep fighting," she says then. "And be back on the ship in eight hours. Commander's orders. Liara out."

The link falls silent. Garrus stands alone in the long wind that runs down the river delta to the sea seething behind him.


	6. A Constellation of Doubt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which old friends deal with a set of new circumstances--with more or less grace.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for taking so long! This one was, in a phrase, a tough nut to crack, but I hope you enjoy it.

Six day cycles pass before Dr. Chakwas clears Tali for light duty. She spends most of that time immersed in the crew entertainment database. Quarantine doesn't offer much variety, and free extranet access is a distant dream these days. The comm resources on the _Normandy_ are strictly allotted to mission-critical transfers.

That leaves her with the media the crew collective has stashed on the ship mainframe. She filters out the period dramas and political thrillers, and, after a few attempts, the action. Normally, impossible feats of gunplay and exploding ships do wonders to unwind her mind, and pointing out the inaccuracies in the tech seasons the experience. Now, last-minute rescues shave a trifle too close to reality.

In her dreams, her dwindling breaths echo in a small, squeezing space. The comm link sizzles with a voice that she knows and loves but can't make sense of before it fades into wet, gurgling static. When she wakes she's pathetically grateful not to need her helmet in the isolation chamber. She splashes her face in the sink and rifles through the database for the most soothing instrumentals she can find. The music droning in the background, she tries to sink back into sleep.

By the end of her quarantine period, she's fast becoming an armchair expert in, among other things, planetary ecology, early Earth civilisations, and the shocking secret history of the justicar order.

"I deny all association with that piece of drivel documentary," Liara declares, seated across from Tali at lunch in the mess. "How it ended up in the database, I have no idea. It was slammed by several distinguished asari critics, and for good reason."

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much." Shepard picks up another spoonful of lentils and vat-grown meat. Tali's translator takes an extra second to parse her sentence: some sort of antiquated saying. "We could always ask EDI who uploaded it."

"Or go straight to the source and ask Samara how the justicars got started," Tali offers. She isn't eating, but the company is welcome. "You said she'd be on the Citadel."

"She sent a message." The dram of hope in Shepard's voice is measured with care. "If she's not in a rush we might still catch her."

"If you need me to go tell the admirals to pick up their feet..." Tali isn't certain if she'd be equal to the task. For Shepard, she'd make the attempt. Their sojourn at Rannoch has been plagued by one delay after another.

"The thought of siccing you on them _is_ appealing, but I've got it," Shepard says. "We leave at 1800 hours. No more waffling. The admirals want to talk, they can get on the QEC like everyone else."

As always, Liara is spooning up her food with one hand and browsing a datapad with the other. "I know you want to hurry to the Citadel, but we might want to make a detour."

"Oh?" Shepard's expression hardly changes. "Okay, bring it on. Can't be worse than the geth prying out war secrets before they were supposed to. At least they didn't get around to it _before_ the Reapers took over the consensus."

Tali cringes privately. The integration of the geth into the allied forces might have gone much worse than it has. However, it has not been smooth: entrenched prejudices die hard, and no amount of furtively observing the organics could have prepared the geth for the reality of working alongside them.

"Admiral Hackett requested our help for a search and rescue in the Osun system." Liara taps up a mission brief on her datapad. "A ship carrying some critical supplies went dark, and there have been recent reports of the Reapers gaining space in that sector."

"Osun--that's in the Hourglass Nebula, right?"

Liara confirms Shepard's question with a nod. "It would only add two relays to our jump to the Citadel."

"Hell, let's do it." Reading over Liara's shoulder, Shepard loosens up, her controlled body language yielding to eagerness. "I can think of a few people who could use an outing after all this diplomacy."

"Our illustrious commander included?" Tali quips.

"I seem to remember there's an 'N-7 Vanguard' written somewhere in my file."

"It seems a simple enough job with the stealth drive." Liara relinquishes the datapad to Shepard. "If we find any Reaper ground troops, here is a subtle recommendation: take Lieutenant Vega."

"I hear you," Shepard says. "I might not have much choice, anyway. The roster looks a little empty at the moment."

Despite the lull, their latest engagements have taken their toll: Javik's close encounter with a Geth Prime and its pulse cannon gave Dr. Chakwas an unintended crash course in Prothean organ trauma. Tali's own leg is still immobilised, though she limps about with the cane speedily enough.

Then there is Garrus, largely unmentioned but never unnoticed. Tali has done her best to keep her few messages to him light and companionable. If she slips, the plummet will be swift and steep.

"Hey," Shepard adds, as if becoming aware of Tali's silence. "The moment Dr. Chakwas says you're good to go, I'll add you back in the rotation."

"Of course," she replies, bland. "It's... it's not that. Sorry."

"Speaking of the roster," Liara says softly. "Shepard? Can I have a word?"

"Here, or in private?" Shepard's voice drops in echo of Liara's timbre. There are sure to be a hundred pressures on her time, but Tali knows she will wrangle in a minute for Liara's concern.

Around them the mess has mostly cleared out. A few stragglers nurse mugs of coffee at the other end of the cluster of tables. Tali reaches for her cane, ready to make her exit if needed.

"I know you've had a lot on your mind--both of you, really." Liara glances over at Tali. In that look is a permission to stay. "I worry about Garrus. You know how he is with those things that really bother him."

"Clamps up like a mag seal." Shepard rubs at the back of her neck. "I got so caught up in making everyone play nice, haven't had much time to talk to the crew. He's not doing too well?"

"No. I don't think he's sleeping much." Liara swishes her finger at the datapad as it threatens to go to sleep, her gaze fixating on the tawny surface. "I tried to talk to him and he joked his way out of it."

"As he would."

Tali bites her lip so hard that her teeth leave a stinging dent. She should say something, anything, knock over the flimsy excuse of her isolation and shoulder responsibility. Any turian might put on an unflappable facade to conceal distress, but Garrus compounds that with a host of deflection tactics.

He nearly died on her watch, on her account. When the initial relief at their survival had passed, she could only swamp herself deeper in guilt.

"I'll talk to him," Shepard says.

"I'm sure he didn't want to burden you." Liara sounds apologetic. " _I_ didn't want to burden you, but I'm running out of options."

"Technically I should be taking a vid call from some salarian suppliers. Hardsuit software." Shepard's neck gives a crack as she cranes her head. "What do I know about hardsuit software? It keeps me alive on the field, that's what."

"Technically you can delegate that," Tali says, snapping to the situation. "If they insist on a personal call, I'll take it for you. I can actually compare specs." Better that than wallowing in her unsolvable conundrums regarding Garrus.

"Thanks, Tali." Getting to her feet, Shepard smiles out of one corner of her mouth. "Sounds like a fair deal to me. Just ask Traynor to set you up with a console."

"I'll handle it." Before Shepard can leave, Tali grasps her forearm. "Go do your thing. And... thank you, too."

Maybe Shepard, with her effortless, implicit understanding of people, can read the trembling note beneath Tali's gratitude. At the moment, Garrus is more than a friend in a spot of trouble. The possibility that he might have died at Adas bears no thinking, but the fact that he lived does not erase the weight of those hours on the crumbling station.

Shepard covers Tali's hand with her own, then lets the contact break. "I'll do my best."

* * *

The door sweeps open behind Garrus, admitting a slant of light and the patter of human feet into the port lounge. Through the murky exhaustion, he recognises the rhythm of the steps.

"Shepard." The gravel of silence grits his voice; he's hardly spoken to anyone today. In the last several hours. Day and night are bleeding together in his perception. She must have some matter at hand: she's been so busy that he's barely caught a glimpse of her. He shifts on the sofa as she seats herself at the end, and faces her diagonally, his elbow resting on his knee.

"Hey, Garrus." There's warmth and iron in her tone.

"How'd the search and rescue go?" He tells himself to concentrate. He _does_ know the latest squad assignments if his brain will simply cooperate. "I see you managed without me."

He almost regrets that choice of comment. His own repartee shouldn't sting him.

"Just barely," Shepard allows. "A moment of your time?"

"You can have as much as you like." He spreads one arm. "We're in transit, I've fiddled the heavy weapons to my satisfaction for--for now. I'd tell you that talking to Aria T'Loak is a recipe for trouble, but we wouldn't be going to her if we weren't desperate."

"True on both counts." She wouldn't voice such agreement within hearing of most of the crew. He has long been an exception to the rule, trust flowing undammed between them as if they had been friends for a lifetime. He supposes they have, if one counts her second one.

It has been three years. Three years is enough, if they're anything like those he's had on the _Normandy_.

Against the mirror of those years, the instinct to evade her like he's been evading the rest of the squad comes up hollow and cowardly. It's a disservice to Liara--and to Tali, a softer, more insidious inner voice reminds him--but to Shepard, it feels like an even worse breach.

"You know, Garrus"--the syllables of his name fall deliberate--"when I said I'd join you for an insomniac drink, this isn't what I had in mind."

"I have a drink?" He snaps his head towards the bar, looming vacant along the far wall, then back again. In truth, he sought a spot where he might not be disturbed. In the main, he's propped awake by willpower. The nightmares seethe barely below the brim of his consciousness.

"Metaphorically speaking." Shepard sighs, raking a hand through her unravelling bun. "Don't make me want one too badly before we're done here."

Ah. She _is_ here on business.

"I'll make the attempt." He straightens, cognisant of the rare stiffness in his back. Too little exercise as of late. "Would help if you told me what this is about."

"Well," Shepard says. "First off, about the fact that you're leaving impressions of your ugly mug in the bulkheads because you're too tired to duck them. EDI's been correcting your calibrations."

"Hey, hey now."

She grins. "Okay, not just yet. I told her you'd notice if she tweaked them."

In spite of his dismay, laughter tugs at his throat. "Appreciate it. I'd probably think I was starting to hallucinate."

"You _will_ , though," she continues. "You sleep three or four times in an Earth day. I'll say it as your commander, or as your squad leader, or as your friend: you need to deal with this."

He can't help the way he bristles, his shoulders drawing back, his head bowing so the fringe rises into a menacing outline. He quells the tarry swell of injured pride. "I _am_ dealing with it."

"You've got an interesting idea of 'dealing'." Shepard remains level, only angles her head to maintain the eye contact. "Is there something here I'm not getting? If you were human..." She pauses. "But you're not. I'm not an expert on how turians react to trauma."

 _Trauma_ , she says. The word rings both clinical and piercing.

It isn't that he had a close call. The prospect of his own demise in the line of duty has been drilled into him since childhood. He has served among humans for long enough to understand that the human response to grievous injury or near death can be devastating: elementally, violently emotional.

"Every time we climb into that shuttle, one or more of us might not come back." It's a truism, but she only regards him. "It's not the fact of it, Shepard. It's the how."

Her brow furrows. "Dying with honour? Going down fighting?"

"That's part of it." Hell, if he can imagine explaining this to one person in the universe, it would be her. "If this was a turian ship, I'd have been disciplined and maybe demoted already. You're... not supposed to fall to pieces over something like this."

"You're still in one piece, Garrus."

He digests that for a beat. "That's not a thing you'd hear from a turian superior."

She drops forward from her erect posture. "Want to elaborate for the puzzled human in the audience?"

When he haltingly opened up about the loss of his team on Omega, she sat forward as she is doing now, and listened until his words ran out, with wordless, rapt focus and not a hint of condemnation. He shuts his eyes and lets his voice drift up, flanged with rue.

"In the Hierarchy, there's... a clear rule. Whatever you do, it always serves the collective good. If you get your head messed up, you go get it screwed back on straight. That's the theory."

"That's what the Alliance teaches, too. Something tells me there's a plot twist coming."

"From the turian point of view, humans are pretty much emotional high explosive." He shrugs. "I know, you wouldn't think so from knowing me. The point is, the most stoic human you can imagine probably equals the average turian."

"So the book says to get your head looked at, but the actual rule is to shut up and suck it up."

Garrus doesn't answer right away. His eyelids feel leaden, but his mind is racing. Shepard is one of the best sources of ease and comfort he has, and this topic sends him teetering. Maybe she can balance it out.

"Dying in a fight is one thing," he says at last. "You accept that. Going out when you _can't_ fight, well. I almost choked to death in my helmet. That's..."

He can hear her tense. Her shoes scuff along the floor.

"Sorry." The word tumbles from his mouth like a stone.

"Go on," she says.

"Your dying breath is best spent on dropping another enemy. The last thing I remember thinking is that I wanted something to shoot. Like there was something shameful to just... expiring."

Shepard exhales a loud, incredulous breath. Then she leans in, close enough that her next breath touches his cheek. "Screw that. You survived."

He slits one eye to look at her. Her countenance is firm, as if she is willing her words into truth, into actuality.

"I did." He lets his eyes open fully. "No points for style, perhaps, but I did."

"That being so," she goes on, "I need--we all need--you to keep body and soul together here. You're hurt. Let's start with that."

"I'm going to regret this, aren't I?"

She lets out a hitching chortle. "Depends. How much do you hate the prospect of seeing someone about that blindingly obvious case of post-traumatic stress you've got going?"

He collapses into the sofa, bereft of care for his dignity. "A lot."

"I know." Shepard withdraws a notch. "Might be the war wouldn't miss one man, but this crew would miss you a great deal. It already does."

"Ouch, Shepard," he grumbles.

"I mean it." Her mouth slants to the side. He's rather sure her expression isn't one of displeasure. "As many times as you need me to kick your ass to get you out of this, I will. You're one of the best friends I've ever had."

"Sure you couldn't do better? The hope of humanity, hanging out with dusty ex-vigilantes from Omega..."

She punches him in the shoulder. "Shut it."

They sit in silence, old soldiers, old companions. Garrus feels his body starting to slacken, to surrender to the need for rest.

Shepard mumbles, or maybe his own mind is clouding. "Dim the lights in the port lounge, EDI. Nobody goes in there for the next few hours."

"Of course, Shepard."

"Can get to my damn bunk from here," he protests.

"You keep your ass on that sofa and get some rest." This time her hand lands on his forearm, pressing down as she rises. "I can make that an order."

He'd retort with some variation of being a terrible turian and not taking orders like the rest of them. In that moment sleep surges over him, and in fact, the galaxy probably holds no safer place for a nap.

* * *

Walking through the Citadel is eerie. Someone seems to have slapped a gaudy veneer of tranquillity over reality as the rest of the galaxy knows it. The skylamps above the Presidium Commons shine in agreeable shades of yellow, and advertisements loop from storefront speakers in pleasant, inviting asari voices.

In the nooks and corners you can see the war seeping in. The docks are thronged with ships seeking entry. Refugees from every species clutter the impromptu quarters set up in loading bays, storage areas and emptied public buildings, filling the docks and trickling out into the Lower Wards.

Haggard as these refugees are, they are the lucky ones. They made it off-world when the Reapers hit.

Backed by Shepard's Spectre authority and the fragile title of emergency ambassador to the quarians, Tali would have the run of the Citadel. Instead, she parks herself in a turian café in the Commons and sorts through Flotilla requisitions for three hours. Whether she wants the position or not, she is the voice of her Fleet, scrabbling for purchase in Shepard's great creaking alliance while the galaxy burns. Resettling a world, here at the end of all worlds.

Thus far, joining the united front consists of stupendous amounts of paperwork, peppered with favours and negotiations. She leaves messages offering rations and requesting hardware, barters for dextro-friendly medicine with comm channels tweaks and shielding upgrades. Everyone has something they need, and the quarians unexpectedly find themselves in a position to supply.

At times, the streams and eddies of communications even drown out the incessant mutter of her self-blame. For some in the crew, the visit is long overdue shore leave; for others, it merely changes the nature of their duties. As soon as they docked, Shepard set off to her private rendezvous with Aria.

Her omni-tool chimes with a message: an invitation from Chloe Michel to come to Huerta Memorial Hospital and have a look at their stocks. In due course the Citadel will be seeing quarian wounded. Whatever information Tali can spread now may save lives later.

After the chat, prospective but hopeful, she lingers by the kiosk in the patient lounge. The selection of human poetry holds some promise for downtime reading. She's almost chosen a volume when a familiar silhouette darkens the doorway to the clinic proper.

Her first, absurd instinct is to duck behind the counter. However, if she can pick Garrus out in a crowd at a glimpse, his eye misses next to nothing. His posture is loose, casual, too deliberately so. It takes her a second to put together why he is at Huerta, and scarcely another to understand that he might not want company.

She could let him walk past on a pretext of mutual preoccupation. They both must have errands to run: the _Normandy_ has little time for squatting in dock. With a flick of her credit chit at the reader, she accepts a download of the poetry volume onto her omni-tool and waves with her free hand.

Garrus allows her to catch up with him. His brow-plates skew with surprise or at least a game try at faking it. "Fancy seeing you here."

"I was consulting." She gauges it wiser to steer the conversation away from his own visit. "Ambassadorially." She folds her hands together on her walking stick. No fidgeting now.

"Right, right. Climbing the ladder of political influence." He turns to go, adjusting his stride to her hobbles with the cane. She falls in beside him without thought, because her feet find the length of his step and follow it, because she remembers the patterns of their byplay, like a tightrope walker balancing for as long as she doesn't glance down. "Next thing I know, you'll be in the Council chambers complaining about the job Shepard is doing..."

"When she gets Joker to hang up on me, I'll know to shape up." _Keelah_ , she sounds nearly chirpy. _Way to overcorrect, Tali._ Maybe they can take the lift to the docks and she can make a getaway to Engineering. There's always _something_ to adjust in the drive core systems.

"Where to?" Garrus hovers by the lift controls. "I was going to check out the Zakera market."

"That's... fine," she finds herself saying. "I'm done. With representing the quarian people. For today, in any case."

She holds herself off from a dramatic slump against the wall. She's just consigned herself to a minutes-long ride in a closed space with the one person whose presence she misses and dreads in equal force.

There are secrets and secrets on a ship. Some you can bury and swear your confidante never to spill, but others will trickle out. It is only by the kindness of others that they remain unspoken. The marks of prolonged stress gleam through in Garrus: the jerks between stupour and awareness, the affected carelessness that he stretches over the gouges into his confidence.

She hopes, heartfelt but distant, that their stay on the Citadel can put him on the mend. Obviously Shepard got through to him. For all his studied nonchalance, he does look better.

He makes a comment about Aria's mysterious proposal to Shepard; she ribs him back. The budding silence afterwards is punctured by a salarian and an asari entering the lift, absorbed in an argument. Tali pretends the back of the asari's head is vastly enthralling.

Finally the doors open to spill them into the hubbub of the market. She has to cling to Garrus's heels not to lose him. She would almost do it on purpose, if not for his solicitude in navigating a path for her. They take refuge in an engine repair shop, then a shortcut through the alley that conjoins the shop to an emporium of small arms.

 _Okay. You can do this,_ she rallies herself. _Wander around and mock the mod selection at steady intervals._

When Garrus moves towards the back of the store, she drags her heels beside the rack of pistols. A part of her strives towards him, after the mirage of uncomplicated camaraderie. Is he, too, trying to cloak in normality the strain that's entered their relationship? It's as if they've both splintered, and those sharp edges protrude where they used to fit together.

 _No carrier. No carrier._ The lost geth, unheard in the black. The buried data, the failed mission, and now this bleak, smothering aftermath. All these sorrows, swirling together in her head like signals without a receiver. Worse, she knows the count of both their pain--Garrus's and her own--and yet is powerless to begin dividing it. Especially when he acts as if they've already solved everything.

Tali is no closer to a solution when Garrus returns. She sets down the pistol she was idly inspecting. It's a serviceable weapon, but its lack of punch would pair badly with her needs. Tech to cripple the enemy, guns to bring it down. "Find anything special?"

"Nah," he says. "A couple of promising mods. I'll have to tinker some."

Her eye strays to his left shoulder, where the sniper rifle would sit if he were in armour. That lost M-92 Mantis was an inch from Garrus giving it a name, if turians had any predilection for that kind of sentimentality.

"If you want to head back, I'm good to go." He tilts his head, and she follows his lead.

Back. Back to the _Normandy_ and the humdrum of her recovery. Back so they can debrief with Shepard and find out what Aria T'Loak wants with her.

She almost staggers at the bilious resistance that rises in her. _I'm sick of this, sick to my stomach, sick to my heart of bearing up and pretending--_

_Pretending that everything will be okay._

Her hands clench. They duck into a corridor, a rapid transit station shimmering behind the thermoplastic wall to their left.

"How long are you just not going to say anything?" Her voice crawls ragged and foreign through the mouthpiece.

Beside the station doors, Garrus turns towards her, his mandibles flaring with confusion. "Did I miss something?"

" _Keelah_. Do you need me to make a list?" Balling her free fist, Tali tiptoes uselessly towards his height. "You're going to let this slide? Everything about Adas?"

A pair of asari exit the transit station through the translucent doors. Tali hardly notices their backward glances. The ward corridor is flaking away into another in her mind: ill-lit, airless, jutting with the shrapnel and ruin of a recent destruction.

His face withdraws into control and neutrality. "I don't know what you mean. Sure, enlighten me, but this really isn't the place."

"Then where _is_?" A shrill note lifts her voice. "Let's go back to the ship, and I can choke on this until it strangles me!"

" 'This'? You haven't had it easy lately, but..." She's aware of his hand at her elbow. To soothe or to restrain?

"Yes, _this_!" She's also past caring which he means to do. " 'Pick your team,' Shepard said. I picked _you_. Didn't take Liara. Didn't take Vega or Ash or..."

"Tali."

Her teeth grind together as if to bar her next words. "Two people! Two damn people for a station full of Reapers! Then I get you spaced and you nearly die, and you don't say a cross word about that, either!"

"The Reapers were kind of a surprise twist," Garrus grates out. "As in we had no idea they were coming."

"So that _isn't_ why we prepare for the worst?" An unforgiving clarity settles on her and crystallises her churning thoughts, casting them in cold, glittering finality. "Except I didn't. I nearly got you killed, and you won't even be angry."

It was her error in judgement. Her mistake, her lapse, her failure. Nearly one more in a string of blunders stretching back to Haestrom and its degrading sun. How many more must she bury yet?

" _Angry_? Tali, why would I..."

 _Ancestors, do I need to draw a diagram for you?_ Did he have to pick this moment to be dense, when they often hardly need to speak to interpret one another?

"You heard me," she snaps. "Why don't you go ahead, hate me like--" _Like I deserve._

He rumbles out what is probably an oath, some turian idiom her translator can't snatch out of the air. The hands hovering at her sides grip her arms in a blood-stopping squeeze.

"Is that what you've been on about?" He bows forward, his flanged voice a riot of meanings ruled by abrupt fury. "Why you slink out of the room the moment I come in? I have noticed, you know."

Her eyes widen and he can surely tell, the lambent slivers of them rounded out even through the visor.

"That was a cock-up of a mission," Garrus continues before she can begin to reply. "We both know that. That's what you call it when your squad has to haul your sorry ass out of orbit in the end."

Tali's throat catches and works. It doesn't occur to her to wrest herself free, though she can feel the pressure of his fingers through the suit.

"That's a thing that happens to every idiot who takes up a gun and goes out to change the galaxy. You make a bad call and people die. You fuck up and the job goes to hell faster than you can spit."

"I--I didn't mean..." What did she mean? She was so soaked in self-recrimination that it was all she could see.

"So you blame yourself," he bites out. "Right now, you want me to punish you for your bad call, so all that guilt feels like it has a purpose." Anger--and hurt--clot his voice. His shoulders are down, his head bent forward almost to her level. "Let me tell you one thing."

A pause, as if he expects her to interject.

"I will not." Garrus's mandibles tighten against his jaw. "Find someone else to be your damn executioner. I left that career long ago."

He releases his grip. The station doors shuff as he stalks through them, and the shaded window swallows his silhouette. Tali stumbles back into the corridor wall, stooping down with her shoulders drawn in until they ache, making herself as small as she can against the multitude of people shoving and striding past.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AntigravityDevice is a blessed enabler and a canny betareader, and I could not have finished this chapter without her. ♥ Much love, darling.
> 
> If you're enjoying this, comments are treasured!


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